Data centers will look ridiculous with tiny future servers.

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Doctorzoidy@lemmynsfw.com⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

Was looking through my office window at the data closet and (due to angle, objects, field of view) could only see one server light cluster out of the 6 racks full. And thought it would be nice to scale everything down to 2U. Then day-dreamed about a future where a warehouse data center was reduced to a single hypercube sitting alone in the vast darkness.

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4am@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You think that if we can scale 6 racks down into one cube that someone wouldn’t just buy 6 racks of cubes?

They’ll always hunger for more.

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think what will happen is that we’ll just start seeing sub-U servers. First will be 0.5U servers, then 0.25U, and eventually 0.1U. By that point, you’ll be racking racks of servers, with 10 0.1U servers slotted into a frame that you mount in an open 1U slot.

Silliness aside, we’re kind of already doing that in some uses, only vertically. Multiple GPUs mounted vertically in an xU harness.

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- Lucien@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You’ve reinvented blade servers
  
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- partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  The future is 12 years ago: HP Moonshot 1500
  
  “The HP Moonshot 1500 System chassis is a proprietary 4.3U chassis that is pretty heavy: 180 lbs or 81.6 Kg. The chassis hosts 45 hot-pluggable Atom S1260 based server nodes”
  
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  - MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That did not catch on. I had access to one and the use case and deployment docs were foggy at best
    
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  - sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, that’s the stuff.
    
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MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
They look silly now. Many data centers are not scaling up power per rack. With GPUs, there are often two chassis per rack.

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- InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Have that problem ourselves, they didn’t provision power or cooling for this kind of density, and how do you pipe in multiple megawatts to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere?
  
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- Geologist@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I had this problem with Equinix! They limited our company to like 10kva per rack, and we were installing nvidia dgx servers. Depending on the model we could fit only one or two lol.
  
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I sometimes wonder how powerful a computer could be made if we kept the current transistor size we have now, but still built the machine to take up an entire room. At what point would the number of transistors become more of a problem than a solution? 🤔

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- Deepus@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Isnt the main limiting factor signal integrity? Like we could do a CPU the size of a room now but it’s pointless as the stuff at one end wouldnt be able to even talk to the stuff in the middle as the signal just get fucked up on the way?
  
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  - LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Signal integrity will probably be fine, you can always go with optical signalling for the long routes. What would be more of an issue is absurd complexity, latency from one end to the other, that kind of stuff. At some point, just breaking it down into a lot of semi-autonomous nodes in a cluster makes more sense. We kind of already started this with multi-core CPUs (and GPUs are essentially a lot of pretty dumb cores). The currently biggest CPUs all have a lot of cores, for a reason.
    
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  - Jolteon@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    IRC, light speed delay (or technically, electricity speed delay) it’s also a factor, but I can’t remember how much of a factor.
    
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- UniversalFlamingo@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  🤯
  
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XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Only if storage density out paces storage demand. Eventually, physics will hit a limit

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- mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Physics is already hitting limits. We’re already seeing CPUs be limited by things like atom size, and the speed of light across the width of the chip. Those hard physics limitations are a large part of why quantum computing is being so heavily researched.
  
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  - XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Which means it doesn’t seem like the limit has been hit yet. For standard devices, the general market has not moved to the current physical limitations
    
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theotherbelow@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
They tend to fill the space. I mean if you drive by a modern data center, so much grid electrical equipment is just right there. Now if hypothetically supermachine uses all that power sure, small data center. Unless they have a nuclear reactor they should (fu felon musk) only rely on grid/solar/renewables.

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