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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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