And precisely because it's such a huge headache to do yourself, I think a small company could make a nice business wrapping up used datacenter cards in that sort of server.
The electricity prices are relevant because if you paid $0 for your H100 and didn't use it a single time, you could buy millions of tokens in inference just on the electricity it draws while idling. If you can't keep that thing saturated through the night, you're probably underwater overnight. Likewise, it's too small to run even the frontier open source models so you need to be able to live with worse models.
Max power matters because you aren't going to run many of those H100s before you blow breakers in most houses. Newer houses in the US are 15A service to non-kitchen breakers, so 1650W (that might be peak rather than continuous, not sure). If you're plugging that into an existing run, you could maybe run 2 before you start blowing breakers? You can't just plug 4 H100s into the wall in a normal house.
Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'd be curious, it'd be neat to run my own inference for something more than what'll run on a 3080.
A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.
My home still has 100 amp service (as does almost the whole city, most of it is a historic district), but it was built in 1910 so that's not shocking.
> A electrician can plop in a electric car charger for instance, that is a 40-50 amp circuit.
Oh yeah, I was mostly talking about having to upgrade the service to the house from the pole. A new circuit with a single outlet isn't horribly expensive, but needing to upgrade service is pretty rough.
But I never assumed it was to be cost competitive at current token rates. I assumed it was for the same reasons people might use open source hardware. Freedom to tinker, etc.
Models are too big now
if you haven't heard a 5u server intended for a datacenter rack come to life it's quite the experience. Sounds like a plane taking off.
Helicopter. I live in Yeovil, Somerset, UK - there's a helicopter factory just down the road. I had a IBM "AS/400" or whatever they are called now in our computer room rack for a customer and it made nearly as much noise as everything else put together. It was clearly tuned for start up noise to impress because they would fire up in sequence, rise to a crescendo and then slow down in sequence to just a din instead of painfully loud.
A switch or PC server on boot will normally run up cooling fans instantly to max as a default protection mechanism until the "OS" has started and sensors read and then the fans will slow down to deal with the actual thermal load.
If you switch off your air conn, it gets noisy, quickly. Recently in the UK we are seeing routine temperatures around 30C and we broke 200 odd year records for temperatures a few weeks back. I know its even worse elsewhere but our infrastructure is not designed for this. Here we are at the same latitude as Calgary AB!
Anyway, what is it good for? To not overload the PSU for one, because spin-up needs more energy, until it has reached it's intended range of RPM. (for fans & HDDs)
Another reason to spin-up high initially, to fall down to slower when up, is to overcome friction in the bearings, to get stuck things unstuck, and shake dust off. (for fans)
The PSUs are painting their nails when the fans go off initially. The GPUs, RAID controllers and co are still waking up.
A further counter example is an Equallogic PS6500. That has 48 3.5" spindles in it and three PSUs plus a few fans and two controllers. The whole thing boots in a couple of minutes.
Until the thermal management kicks in, they sound like jet planes. When the thermal management starts and assesses the required cooling, it’ll throttle down the fans to reasonable levels.
That is, until the moment you push the machine to its limits. When then happens, you might get back to the same levels of the boot time, but it’ll require you to push everything to the max - CPU, memory, storage (all 24 bays) and so on. For a normal user, there is a lot of room and it’s virtually impossible, even with a dozen of Teams windows open.
If these do end up in Home Labs, it's going to be a server rack in the basement and not the server rack at the other end of the room.
If they are too loud, yes. In my part of the world basements are not common, but my shed would be a sensible place for one.
You don't need much of a fan if you are prepared to pump a lot of water.
I mean, sure, if you're trying to cool the thing with 100ml of water, then yeah, you need a fan.
OTOH I have an unused car radiator in my garage, a quiet and cheap pump, and space to hang that radiator outside the window. It's barely an afternoon's worth of work if the H100s already have liquid-cooling intakes/exhausts on them already (I dunno, I have never seen one in the flesh).
I'm pretty certain 10+ litres of constantly circulating water (antifreeze, in my case) through a car radiator would be sufficient to cool down 2x H100s. Hell, add in 10 RPM used car cooling fan and I can probably cool 20x of those running at full-bore.
If anyone wants to ship me a bunch of H100s, I'll happily build it all out, take pics and videos and post it back here. Just sayin' :-)
These things get hot and are fussy about their requirements.