Bitcoin Forum

Lately I have been trying to get my CCENT Cisco cert right now.

A idea recently came to me.

I'm wondering if anyone has ever considered building rack mounted ASIC?

That's kind of like building a rack mount for ipads or iphones or notebooks.  Server rooms are dying, like dinosaurs.

Racks make sense when the computer is big or you need a room full of them.  As computers get smaller few have the need for a server room.  An ASIC is about the size of a coffee mug.  Compare that to my several full size computer cases and then realize the ASIC is about 100 times faster than all my machines combined. 

The first computer (ENIAC) was so big you could park a school bus inside the computer.  The computer modules lined the walls of a lab at 33rd and Walnut in Philadelphia.  It was set up kind of like a U shape.  You could park a school bus inside the U.  Today you have more computing power on your cell phone.  There is little need for rack mounted asics.  And can you imagine the cost...   a 42u rack could hold 14 Avalons and at 99BTC that's a quarter million dollar rack you got there. 

You need more than one of those?

 ;D

You don't know anything about computers.

Ask your self this, what happens when instead of having mining farms consisting of 100 GPU's, you have have 100 Avalons?

Have you ever considered how difficult it would be,to manage those units?

Do you even know what a KVM  switch is?

You obviously don't have a clue what you are talking about because datacentres are still being built and demand continues to grow. To say that server rooms are dying is like saying the internet is dying. Because the internet is built upon a foundation of datacenters. Without datacenters there is no internet.

No matter how powerful an iphone gets or how fast the wireless connection is, we are always going to need server rooms.

LOLZ.  Funniest (unintentional) comment of the day.  PCs might be dying but when your ipad connects to a web app where do you think it is connecting to ... A DATACENTER.
Datacenter square footing is growing at 10% to 20% a year and shows no signs of slowing.  The datacenters being built now are unimaginably large compared to just years ago.  


Which would be a good reason to put that in a high security locked cage at a top teir, bonded and insured data center right?  $250K in computing equipment in class A building or $250K in computing equipment running in my garage... hmm that is a hard one (and this is coming from the guy who at one time DID have $20K of GPU rigs running in his garage).



To the OP the Avalon ASIC could be easily moved to a 3U (maybe 4U) server case and rack mounted.  Strange Avalon team didn't offer this as an option from day 1.  My guess is they are in a rush to just get some product out the door.  Honestly what makes ASICs special is the ASICs.  If Avalon sold just the modules I would buy those and rack mount them myself.

Data centres have their place for this sort of thing, yes it would be nice idea if they could be rack mounted. Data centers provide, a near perfect environment as a clean room with high energy usage being normal, with bonus of security, both on the web and physically.

Rack mounted cases on the whole are more expensive and heavier than what they need to be so keeping costs to a min, the developers of various versions of ASIC apparently didn't see it as a worthwhile cost to add.
They know a lot of their customers will just be keeping them at home, the few who do end up buying a lot of them to put in data centers could remove the parts and assemble them back into a standard 3u Rack case if they wanted. Not sure if it be classed as easy, but possible.

I don't see this as a must or a needed thing for ASIC developers to consider doing, the big point is to have more ASIC developers actually existing in the first place. However I'm sure you can try throwing this suggestion at the guys behind ASICMiner, they are going to be selling to the masses, rather than completely self-mining their ASIC's they built soon. There is also Enterpoint who are considering making a Cairnsmore 2, which is going to be a pretty powerful ASIC, so tbh keeping it at home might not even be realistic power usage wise.

But Personally if I wanted to rackmount an ASIC, I'd strip the parts out of what ever case it came in and see how many I could fit into a 3u case I bought myself.

IIRC, the Reclaimer ASIC was supposed to be 80GH/s and rackmountable, but it ended up getting canceled.

And yes, Viceroy is Hil-arious!

You forgot one of the most important things, cooling.

Yes I'm an idiot because I don't see the need for commercially available rack mounted asics.  I didn't realize I speaking to a Walton or Eric Schmidt.  Were you intending to buy more than one avalon?  Anybody spending $1.7 million US to mine bitcoin is not going to be buying someone else's hardware.  And you don't need a KVM f-nut, you need a usb hub for your army of asics.  You're so 1990.

Yep, there are a few large data-centers.  Not a plethora of small data centers like there once were.

Stopped reading.

ASICMINER

http://i2.wp.com/mineforeman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ASICMinerPCB.jpg

http://mineforeman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ASICMINER_racks.jpg

Exactly... they built their own.  They didn't buy avalons, or butterflys, or bASICS or gxminers (cough).

Stop talking. You have no idea what you are talking about.

We are seeing datacenters of all sizes popping up. Lots of smaller DCs supporting regional areas. As technology grows it's spreading out and the infrastructure has to follow.

Kinda goes a long with being a near perfect environment as a clean room. Yes cooling is very important.

(cough) bullshit (cough) 

There is no such thing as a small datacenter anymore.  They are on the order of hundreds of thousands of feet and they are concentrated in a few small areas of the country, like Ashburn VA. 

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/11/loudoun-5-million-square-feet-of-data-centers-more-to-come/

Now you shut up and let the big boys talk.

I used to work in the spare office space of the server building for a regional Australian Bank. It wasn't hundreds of thousands of square feet.

And the company I worked for had its own server rack for running its own servers and switches etc. You know what there was even a bit of space left over that would fit an ASIC rack....

Huge Singular Data centers, might be normal in some places (can't really quote outside my experience), but in the Uk and many places in Europe, small data centers are the normal. It is my understanding based on quick bit of research, really large ones are maybe more common in America, but I also found small ones too.
It's rare to find really big data centers here (UK), instead there are lots small ones. Yes some are all owned by the same company.

One of the Data Centers I have used, instead of having 1 large data center, it has 3 all in very separate locations, to provide a element of redundancy protection, have them well connected so if in the unfortunate event something goes wrong, your backups or even other servers are in the another Data Center, unaffected and could easily recover from a disaster. Something not so easy with a single large Datacenter.

Gotta love it when a thread turns into an idiot block.

IMO: datacenters are actually becoming smaller and more distributed. I personally know of several medium sized businesses who have broken up their single large data center and distributed parts of it out to various locations / branch offices.

Personally I have several racks inside the clean room I built in my garage.

Ultimately as hardware gets cheaper and connections faster we'll see more and more small datacenters springing up wherever they're needed.

That's ridiculous.  In 1999 what required a rack of machines can now be done in a 1U unit.  Major companies will continue to build server rooms, because they have the data, but smaller companies simply have no need for all that space or the insane cost to build out such a space. 

Like you I own two racks, one in the house and one in the garage.  Like yours they take up room about the space of two large refrigerators.  All they do now is hold a bunch of old heavy servers that are now worthless.  These $50 servers cost $20 to $50 thousand when new a decade ago.

Google and Walmart need data centers.  With terrabyte hard drives the rest of us are lucky to need 1U of rack space to store every piece of data we will ever encounter.  You don't need a rack for anything you do.... nor will most prospective asic owners.  These days a quarter rack is far more than most any person can use for every component in their house.

Getting back to the original question, if you have a 1/4 million dollars to spend on this problem you are probably going to build your own chip... you are probably NOT going to buy 14 Avalons.  Even if you did buy them it's trivial to place a computer that isn't designed to be rack mounted on a shelf installed in the rack.  A shelf (including pull-put slider rails) can be added to ANY rack in 5 minutes. 

I don't think BFL will ever deliver, but I do believe their presentation is exactly what the world wants/needs/expects in an asic.  A coffee cup warmer.  There is no market for rack mounted asic mining rigs and the additional design expense would not be recovered.

Installing a shelf inside a rack is the most retarded thing you can do. Racks are about high-density. A rackmountable ASIC miner would allow you to put much more hashing power in a smaller amount of space vs putting a few oddly-shaped chassis on a shelf. Also, racks and datacenters aren't only for hard drives.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

Yea that 1/32nd of an inch is really gonna cramp your style....
http://www.sweetwater.com/images/items/1800/RkShelfU1-xlarge.jpg

Assuming you aren't going to set anything on top of that.... but then that's just a waste of space. Derp.

Your response is as confusing as mjsbuddha's

That's what dedicated server, vps and webhosting providers are for; of which there are more providers for than ever. I have servers in 25 separate sites worldwide. There are dozens upon dozens of datacenters to choose from even in tiny city-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, Monaco, Malta and even Iceland! Even in third world countries you have a great deal of choice. I've personally hosted servers in 4 different datacenters in the philippines, 2 in egypt, and a half dozen in south africa.

If a datacenter is built in the woods, and no one is around to see it, does it exist?

Also, it really doesn't matter what your density is any more. You can get a full rack w/o power and internet for < 500$/mo anywhere in the world these days with most popular locations as low as 200$. You only need a single redundant drop for all of your boxes (2 network drops -> 2 switches w/ spanning tree & bonding, then split off 2 redundant ports for switches in each sub-rack). So you'd get 2x 100mbit ports @ 200$/mo + 100$ port fee. Then something like 300$/month per rack + 300$/month for 3-4Kw/h usable power. So you end up with 900$/month for your initial rack, and 600$/month for each subsequent rack. It's really a moot point arguing about a few Us. For what you'd pay for high density solutions (and the higher density cooling to go with it) it's usually cheaper to buy multiple racks and work out a better deal with your datacenter.

Go ahead and try convincing me that tower chassis are more dense than rackmount.

It isn't confusing at all....that shelf is wasting 1U of rack space from the look of the hole spacing...not helping with rack density unless it is needed.

If the asic is 3 u as it appears you can place 14 of them in a rack with no lost space.  The shelf takes up zero space, the steel fits between the u below and the u above.  It is a 1u shelf.

My only point, per the OP, is that there is no market for rack mounted asics.  Anyone spending $250k or more on ASIC technology will likely be building their own units and the one guy that bought 50 units will probably place them on wire shelves, saving the expense of buying an expensive rack.

What if I wanted to buy just a couple 1U rackmount ASICs and colo them at a small, local, and cheap datacenter instead of letting them heat up my house, make lots of noise, and get clogged with dust? Racking a server or two doesn't cost a fortune. Especially with the low bandwidth requirements for mining.

Well see that's your problem... you're using them for storing out dated equipment. I've got one rack that's filled with my music mixing stuff (including a 42 tray dvd copy appliance) and the other with a couple of servers 2u servers and all my fpga-s... and yes they're on shelves, but I'd sure love to be able to buy rackable asics. The main reason I run them in the rack is because it's got it's own AC cart and that's by far the best way to keep temps where I want them.

Having connections and discounted rates at a small (YES, small) datacenter nearby, I would totally be interested in a rackmountable ASIC. I was actually disappointed that the BFL MR wasn't rackmountable.

Oh, and this thread is HILARIOUS. IDK which is more comical: the ignorance, or the arrogance.

A rack mounted ASIC would be awesome :)