Bitcoin Forum

When I am visited Hongkong today, saw a green container truck at a square near Wan Chai area, the door is open, there are 2 cartoon tiger dressed people handed a DM to me: welcome to visiting our ASICMINER container miner farm! I was attracted to step into the container, with soft music around, I saw some one meter high transparent glass tanks, with 1/3 the depth of the liquid inside,soaking the numerous green PCB board, silent boiling and bubbling. Each glass tank have its own copper pipes, and connect to a small cooling machine. Steam condensed liquid in the above,occasionally, a drop down. LED lights are in the flashing constantly, which bring a lively active feeling.

http://i41.tinypic.com/29ejcrc.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/2mq5nb5.jpg

All right, I have to say, above is just a science fiction fragment. I didn't see the truck at Wan Chai area, it doesn't exist. But the latter part I wrote above is real. In fact, with permission
from friedcat, as a special reporter of Bitell and YangYang's Talk-Show, I officially visited the secret mining facility of ASICMINER based in Hongkong on Nov. 22. And luckily,I am the first person in the planet to have such permission.

http://i39.tinypic.com/1hpirm.jpg

http://i39.tinypic.com/2vj7ndw.jpg

During my visit, the host Alex gave me a warm welcome. The mining farm start its construction from Aug 2013, they purchased the best cooling machines and pumps from China. Use the crane to install
them on the roof. Upto Oct., this mining farm began to output the hash rate. Among this, whole technical team have paid an extremely hard efford in order to race against time.

http://i39.tinypic.com/1zqfv42.jpg

http://i40.tinypic.com/2wd7bkx.jpg

The mining facility are located within an industry area, have a composed of dozens of standard racks you can find in every common data center. Each rack contains 3 sealed liquid glass tank, blades are all operating quietly in the liquid, while switchers hanging above.

http://i41.tinypic.com/29nxc9x.jpg

If turn off the air-condition, this place is even more quiet than library. In contrast, I once had a few Avalons, I can hear them roaring even I close 2 heavy doors. This system is so nice,
the shiny brass and red valve arranged in rows, reflect a sense of rhythm.

http://i41.tinypic.com/302qa00.jpg

Alex told me:
The immersion cooling technology has been developed for years, very mature. He also showed me a prototype liquid tank, it was build for ASICMINER for test purpose. The first version of Block Erupter Blade had many external interfaces, equipped with a heat sink, with a large size, designed for air cooling. Now the new Blade PCB have been greatly improved in order to optimize liquid cooling results, PCB is reduced in height, this can use less liquid.

In fact, this cooling technique is of the planet most advanced. Same technique are applied for super computer systems.Through the usage of immersion cooling,calculating density can reach far beyond air cooling system. At present, each liquid tank can accommodate 92 blades, in future, could be more. Each 200cc liquid, can afford up to 4kw mining power. Each cooling pipe can afford the power consumption of the 25kW,a liquid tank can be installed 4 sets of cooling pipes.

http://i43.tinypic.com/6j3mly.jpg

In the Bitcoin world, time is everything, in order to speed up deployment, the system used a number of common equipments, from the rack to the valve, you can find them in local markets easily. After liquid and mining equipments loaded, each tank weighed about 200 kilograms. In stead of use expensive guide rail fixed to the rack, they coated with Teflon material at tank bottom with very small friction resistance,as long as the most common manual operated fork lift can easily push into racks.

This system inherit the character of practical, simplified, low cost high performance of friedcat have been pursued, all this is designed for fast and large scaled deployment.

The tank is no pressure vessel. When I touched the outer wall of the liquid tank,feel no higher than the body temperature. Alex showed me his iPhone, a monitor App can display the room temperature , liquid conduit entrance temperature and the outlet temperature, all read below 37 degrees. The liquid made by 3M, it is very expensive, it's not only impossible to get fired, and itself is excellent fire extinguishing material. You can find them in every major financial data center , the fire-fighting systems use the same liquid.


Low-temperature,no-pressure,fire-prevention materials, These make the mining facility have incomparable safety level.

http://i39.tinypic.com/oieiw7.jpg

Stability is a must for a mining farm . All cooling machines and bumps have redundancy. It have 3 internet uplinks. Every electronic devices used in the liquid tank are strictly tested, found most appropriate suppliers. People know R&D and chip development are the most important part of a major chip supplier in Bitcoin market, but people may don't know they cost substantial amount of manpower and time on deployment technologies . Friedcat team have excellent experiences on all the above.

http://i43.tinypic.com/wti1hw.jpg

This farm have not been put into full operation, some racks are still waiting. I guess they are waiting for the next generation chips from ASICMINER.

http://i43.tinypic.com/k9u928.jpg

Based on the actual deployment of immersion cooling system, ASICMINER guarantee its future with large-scale deployment capability. The system is complete and precise with limited cost.

It was built for large-scale deployment worldwide, just connect to power supply, network, commercial high-density deployment could be completed perfectly at anywhere. Oh, by the way, at cold area,
this system might be able to provide heat for the room, used for heating.

http://i41.tinypic.com/33jpl76.jpg

And, yeah, maybe in a few months, the container truck I described at the beginning might come to true.

(for a Chinese version , please visit 比特儿： http://bitell.sinaapp.com/show.php?tid=938 )
(Yangyang will release a short video taken by me later)

About me:
   My name is Xiaogang Cao, and I'm running a Chinese crowdfunding website: dreamchina.com. If you like this article, please consider donate btc to a charitable project I'm promoting: http://dreamchina.com/projects/59666 . by sending btc to 1AftZ6QoWcdmaNWZsJyT9GVVdRAT5mVtTB you will help more than 400 children. Any size of donate is welcome.

This is pretty amazing.

Great article ! Thank you very much for your report !

Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

Oh boy! This is VERY exciting news and some very good input from someone who has been to the baddest mining farm in the world! I expect this news to be very helpful with the share price, however it just made me want to hold this stock even more now!BTC

Hi guys, please donate ;)

these dudes are banking !

Is ASICMINER HQ in Hong Kong? If yes then Ima pay them a visit when I go back to Hong Kong (my hometown)!!!!

I'm wondering where the boiled liquid is going, you said the tank is not a pressure vessel, so is it just lost?

no wonder I'm getting so little coin for my hash   :P

WOW!!

Thanks for share!

The liquid will not lose, remember it's expensive. the tank is sealed.  the heat is exchanged out and collected to be cool by the cooling machine.

Thanks for this write up.  Small donation sent to your charity.

I wish NY Times, Forbes etc. would report about this... the maturing of Bitcoin rather than some silly satoshi-dpr "link" that some "expert
 came up with.

Your farm looks very greate. Nice work.

 But when you are from ASICMiner company :

donate? LoL.... Your Mining Farm donate you ;)
The buyer of ASICMiners donate you....

You stay in competition with your own hardware buyers and grap our hashrate....

No, I'm not a team member of AM. I don't own this farm, I'm a visitor.
The donate is not for myself, it's a charity. Please read my signature.

Thank you very much!

So much for being a "secret mining location" when you posted photos of easily identifiable buildings surrounding the area.

If somebody pulls off a structure hit on that facility would the difficulty drop enough for the rest of us to notice?

Nice racks. Very impressive setup. Any chance of sharing "the specs" of this facility?

Couldn't help but hum along to this song. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI) (Deus Ex Soundtrack - Wan Chai)

I think OP just meant the liquid *looked* like it was boiling. I'm betting it looked like it was boiling because the pumps are continually circulating the liquid around the blades.

Impressive operation!  Thanks for the many pictures!

The fluid IS boiling but it boils at a much lower boiling point that water. Since they mention 37 degrees for the room temperature, which I assume is Celsius, I imagine they are using a fluid that boils somewhere between 40-60 Celsius, of which there are a number of options from 3M. Immersion cooling is really neat, just requires a vapor-seal for the container and a condenser to condense the evaporated fluid. So long as you don't exceed your heat exchange capacity, you will minimally pressurize the container.

now that is extraordinary.

and ppl keep worrying about the US gubmint banning Bitcoin.  i don't think so.

and current performance???

Nice... though such images should be posted by an Asicminer PR-Person... At least friedcat promised such PR-Guy...

Thats very impressive!!! goddamn!!

Great article, just wondering how do the blades not short out in water ? as usually if you put anything electrical submerged in water it will just brake.

I take it these are special designed blades that work underwater ?

It's not water, it's a "cooling fluid" made by 3M.

Can't wait for the video, hopefully with sound.  I would like to hear 1000s of blades bubbling in the hot hash tub.

Nice cat farm..... where do they milk the cats to make the coins?

It's a non-conductive liquid (or, much less likely, distilled water which isn't conductive either but has a 100C boiling point which this liquid doesn't seem to have).

Damn. That is an amazing setup.

This is most technologicaly advanced farm I ever seen.
Wonderfull!

This is amazing.

Suggestion: in the future plan deployment and organize R&D around summer implementation so you can have full deployment in winter.

Also consider some industrial locations, most factories I visit in China are very cold in winter. And this cold also affects QC in production.

So partner with production facilities and use waste heat to improve factory conditions. This will actually increase productivity as people will prefer work to avoid cold.

Benefits could include rent discounts and reliable power, and distributed infrastructure.

So much for a "decentralized" coin.

I appreciate the technical work, but images like these challenge my confidence in Bitcoin.

The ownership is distributed, you can buy a seat on the board today, and share in the profits. (The shares are publicly trained) 

Do they have any equipment being manufactured for use there?

probably Fluorinert  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert

I think that coolant was mentioned a couple of times by DeathAndTexas (and was using that stuff too)

Who cares whether "ownership" is distributed? What matters to the long term viability of Bitcoin is whether a government or some other bad actor could take over one or a few mining operations to gain control of the network.

It is extremely unlikely and expensive to maintain 51% of the network.

Indeed.

http://www.coinometrics.com/bitcoin/brix

 :)

AM isn't even 5th in terms of total network hashrate, so we can probably relax, though it would be large for a private mine. The big ones on the list are large pools.

Really cool post thanks op!

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/13/3m-immersion-cooling/

http://www.allied-control.com/immersion-2

Up to 225kW/rack?  That's absolutely insane.  Colo facilities freaked out when I needed 18kW racks.

I totally agree, but don't panic yet we have rule of law for now, and this AM mining operation, If copped by a hostile force, only processes about 1% of the total network traffic and they disperse/sells there hardware to thousands of other miners, so no need to cry the sky is falling just yet.

From the pictures and text at your second link, it would seem that the AM deployment is the first in the world for the Allied Control Immersion 2 platform! The picture at the top is almost certainly AM blades, and:


At 1J/GH that can support 500TH/s in one shipping container! And a PUE of 1.02 is crazy! Compare

https://www.facebook.com/PrinevilleDataCenter/app_399244020173259

1.02 means < 2% of energy is wasted; the rest goes to the boards. Doesn't say anything about the efficiency of the boards, however :)

Thank God we have marketing.

An impressive achievement nonetheless!

So much money for cooling . . .  for such inefficient chips.

I would rather see the 200TH mine that Bitfury is running.  I would bet it is all air cooled, and uses 1/5th the power of ASICMINER.

What is stopping you from taking a flight to see the mine? You could have an awesome post like this so that you would be able to give out glasses of haterade on your thread. Thanks for stopping by but until you have some form of pictures as proof of this "200TH mine that is 1/5 more efficient." please refrain from spreading rumors on a thread that has absolutely zero to do with "bitfury" Thank you come again.  ::)

I identified the location: http://goo.gl/maps/85lpj

It wasn't very hard. It turns out the building with green/blue tiles is where Allied Control's offices are located (Global Trade Centre, Units 305-307, 3/F, 15 Wing Kin Road, Kwai Chung, N.T., Hong Kong). Which makes sense since Asicminer is likely one of their first and/or biggest customer using their latest immersion cooling platform.

Note that Asicminer owns and operates multiple locations, and this one probably represents a small portion of their mining operations.

Fabulous!

Thanks

UUUAAAU ...Fascinating, to conceal deh .. Joo us again of Asian culture shows off her skills .. Yeah, no wonder the walls to enclose their inventions, knowledge and skills do not belong to anyone else. I admire this race a little, as a European I am ashamed in front of 'em in Europe we are as mindless and stupid rednecks, you can not do anything, climbed nemocema .. evil and reverse ... So just to us, it belongs to us, the world belongs to you.

Ps: excuse any mistakes I like simple European, I can not really native language, let alone any more: D

probably permission and/or an invitation by friedcat. :)

chips are important, those miner are not good. They use so many space, 100 KNC Jupiter can achieve the same TGhs that they have now. Not impressive at all.

Hopefully, their new chip works.

wow I am impressed.

Thanks for the article and pictures, very cool use of technology.  Donation incoming!

with respect,
you're missing the big picture... "those" unimpressive chips were made a yr ago. 130 nm.  incredibly cheap to produce for ASICMiner.  then they were used to make USB miners, then blades and Cubes (which are smaller blades).  same PCBs can be populated using Gen 3 chips and you end up with an in-place replacement of a blade on a backplane, USB, Cube module from an end user stand point.  to manufacture, just fire up the "same" schematics and blueprints, use new chips and stamp out same USBs, Blades, Cubes etc...

you can't have the cart before the horse.... while Gen 3 is being worked on, you develop new devices (V2 blade and Cube), techniques and cooling solutions (liquid) that can make use of Gen 3 followed by Gen3+n chips.  efficiency and density matter more than just speed alone.
you can't just sit and wait for Gen 3 or 4 and only THEN develop new devices and cooling. while you wait for Gen3, you make everything else ready.
then, when Gen3 chip is out, our heads will spin from the hashing power that will come online.

regardless of devices, you need space, electricity and currently loud fans (loud even if you have those quiet 100 KNCs going at once) and if you look at a KNC it has alot of empty space... dense blades do not waste space ("blade" approach).  you can't really run a couple of Th/s with your 100Amp (average electrical service in US) electrical service at your house (I won't even mention apartments).  the heat and noise are not possible to deal with by practical and reasonable means that don't disrupt the living space and conditions.  whereas liquid cooling on this scale can be run in your backyard pretty much or your basement if you wish...

we still have companies and miners interested in creating just a powerful device (chip) but not efficient by all other, long term measures.  ASICMiner is leading the way on this.

anyway.. just my thoughts and rants... do your own thinking and analysis. always.

Impressive report and awaiting the video!

Unjacketed 2 pair wiring for the ethernet connections - space saving, I guess?
Also may prevent wicking of the Novec...

I wonder about the shielded plugs, though. With no ground connection / shielding along the cable, the shielded plug does nothing, and I'd think they'd be more expensive.

To me it just illustrated bitcoin mining's diminishing returns to scale.  I doubt this kind of operation will be viable long-term.  Heat is a waste product for these guys that's clearly expensive to dispose of.  But for small home mining operations, that heat can be put to good use heating the air and water.  Distributed mining also distributes financial risk.  These kinds of operations strike me as fat that the industry will trim as it matures.

There will never be an asic sold for less than the manufacturer can make it for.

10 MB Ethernet (what blades have) can run on Cat3 if my memory serves me right.  Cat3 setup is cheap and requires no shielding other than what twisted pairs already have.  Jacketed wires will be nothing but a pipe for liquid to get into...  shielded RJ45 jacks were either cheap(er) to get than plastic ones at that time or maybe they have something to do with heat exchange? 37 degrees is pretty hot for a plastic RJ45 connector (non-stop) I would think, but I'm really just guessing the purpose of the metal plug.

Not sure I understand your point.  Running costs are a separate issue from manufacturing costs.

First of all running costs for AM is likely less than running costs for home miners because of the price of electricity and the high efficiency.

Second, when manufacturers can make asics for half the cost that the average joe can get one for that means they can easily have twice the hashing power for the same cost.

We know that just about every asic available right now will either just barely or not reach ROI but asic manufacturers will have no problem reaching ROI.

They've proven its NOT expensive to remove though. With capital investment and advanced tech, they can almost passively remove a 'shit tonne' of heat and achieve infinite density.

This is why Peercoin will pay off long-term.

37 degrees wouldn't matter too much as there is no thermal cycling, no real mechanical loads or anything to deform/take advantage of the impaired strength.

Thank you!

This is insane!  :o

badass

Electricity could be effectively free for a home mining rig in a house with electric heat (air and water), since they would otherwise be spending the same on electricity to produce it from their actual heaters.

All that tells me is the industry is very immature still.

The pictures made it look expensive.  And the OP mentioned the coolant being expensive.  Numbers would be more persuasive though.  In any case, the heat is still expensive to make, and long-term, competitive mining operations will have to make good use of the heat they produce.  Versatility will be a strong advantage here, and scaling up would appear to diminish from this.

Let's check back in a few years and see how the predictions of our resident time traveler turned out...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/

If it takes until 2015 to reach 1000, I'm gonna ... 


sell one! :-[

And after that then we will all go back to gold and silver, now just who has been the biggest purchasers of both in the last 10 years?

Sweet rig.. I'm envious and ashamed that it aint *mine!!*

The most exciting thing I realized is that we are at the edge of innovation. Soon comes the time that Bitcoin/mining will drive innovation in related fields that was previously not expected, for example pushing immersion cooling technology like in this case.

I left you a small donation of 25 millibit yesterday also, thanks for the great report! :)

Dude, I am an owner of a major computer review site.  The cooling is impressive, but nothing I haven't seen in a dozen datacenters throughout the USA.  The chips, however, are PIGs.

Nuff said.

You know it's good when the bitfury boys post on here and basically say "I hate it, nuff said."

Someone having a hard time selling their bitfurys?


+1

They look expensive, but remember this is mostly passive. All we have here is helfty shelving, aquariums full of expensive coolant [which isnt consumed], piping and then a few high flow heat exchangers [read NOT AC - so only power costs of fluid flow]. You couldn't design this to be comparatively cheaper if you tried,

ummmmm, no

Anandtech is major, Tom's is major (if bought off), [H]OCP is major

delusions of grandeur

wow this is sick, that mining center should mine for me just 1 day that would be perfect lol!

You must be the owner of 1NvqMpXN57WUqxH9Jf2rL9Evaqw86rKbk6.Thank you very much!

ROFL!  Sell?

I have made 3X my ROI, and don't pay for power for my Bitfury (1.5TH worth).  Why on earth would I want to sell those money-printing machines?

Wow!!

Great report. Thank you for your information.

So I can see your setup in Hong Kong and I know the building.

Tell me are you  a registered company in Hong Kong?

RF

Yes, continue to centralize hashrate, please.  ::)

end to end innovation, this shows exactly why bitcoin will always win :)

IIRC the plan is to franchise out the mining containers.  You want to bitch about centralization, go harass the GHash.io people.

Be nice to see an update on this when they change over to a newer chip.

Screw the miners sell us the containers so we can fill them with Ants :D

Project video showing ASICMiners Hong Kong facility:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZavKweMrP4

No only accessible, but also profitable.  :)

Profit = opportunity = desire to fill that opportunity. Unless someone is ACTIVELY feeding the market money as a GGG, your utopian scenario won't exist.

Opportunity => Desire to fill the opportunity + Means to fill the opportunity => Filling the opportunity (before anyone else and to someones satisfaction) => Profit (on both sides, win-win scenario).

Which "utopian scenario" do you have in mind? Surely not everyone (in one area) can have profit not even the majority, sometimes not even the significant part. That is necessary feedback and incentive to move to another area.

Or should my previous post include the "He (midnightmagic) probably means:" prefix ?

am a newbie, so excuse me if i say something stupid,
how can such farms build or install this infrastructure without being worried about changing hardware every 2 to 6 months like most small time farmers do ?

if i understood this correctly if a home farm needs to compete in this market (excluding large farms) one needs to buy a decent 1TB miner and keep growing the units as fast as possible, to keep up with difficulty and grow the farm slow...

am i making any sense ?

The farm is build in a way that the hardware is changable very fast, so even if the current generation is replaced, it's not a problem, especially with this farm. Does that make sense? :)

thank for the reply, it does now :)

Plus, I'm sure Asicminer hardware is profitable for MUCH longer for the manufacturer than it is for the retail purchaser.  They probably haven't upgraded this stuff yet, while most smaller miners have had to dump this hardware long ago.

What's even more amazing is that I don't have to read a single more word on this thread to know in my heart that this is a viable mining outfit and probably trust them fully.

I'm beside myself of what I just read and saw in the OP.

Fuckin' amazing!

Then again, with a couple hundred Chinese dudes, they could dismantle and close up shop over night, heading to better pastures.  ::) ::) ::)

Good job, guys. Good job.

I'm donating now, albeit it ain't going to be much, but it's from the heart and really appreciate the write up.

Despite the claims of "Intel", compare the pictures in the OP with the scenes in the video.