Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Luke is in France”.
And now Luke, what are you doing in all falls yeah, so um Shadow brought me out here. If you guys don’t know what shadow is, there’s been a few videos, uh of them on the LTD channel before uh, but they’re like you, you install this application on your computer. You run it and then you can access a high performance computer in the cloud. Whatever cool sounds good uh, they’re rolling out something, I think they actually rolled it out last week called a power upgrade, which is basically they have this one server and they divide it into eighths. So you get 1 8 of an epic CPU. You get exactly one talking to the engineer about this was really interesting.
This didn’t really end up in the video too much other than just referencing. It vaguely, but you get exactly one dim of RAM and they actually make sure that your VM specifically only calls to that dip. Oh that’s super cool, so you get yeah what a single Channel single Channel bandwidth, but you will never be colliding with anyone else’s requests.
Essentially, a little bit faster because it doesn’t have to scan across multiple dims. It is only ever addressing that one, and then you get one full GPU um, and the reason why I’m just saying GPU is because that part is going to be a little bit more variable right, um they’re planning on working with Radeon in the future. I saw them working with um uh crap. What was it? Quadro 4500s. I believe anyways yeah, you you, so you can get like a sick computer. Basically, their thing is they. They can run 1080p 240 or 4K 60 and it’s all through VM.
So they they got. It one interesting one: oh no, I can’t say that yeah don’t get us in trouble. That’S at 2, 40 in the morning is scary um, but yeah it was sweet.
So we we went to ovh clouds like r d and Manufacturing facility um, and we were able to see where they designed their own water blocks and they designed their own uh. Full, copper, water, cooling runs okay, so that’s cool. That’S really sweet because every single server at ovh every single one, no matter the spec is water, cooled um.
So they have like this really crazy infrastructure for all that I’ll get to that in a moment, um so yeah, but we get to see their r d facility for all this stuff. A lot of that I wasn’t able to show on camera, but it’s sick, um, a bunch of the companies in the area around that facility are like Fair because of them, so there’s like Sheet Metal Manufacturing and they will make the custom rack mounts and Chassis for Ovh, which are like stamped by ovh and everything, there’s PCB manufacturers that are making these dual PCI Express Riser cards because they take these graphics cards that they get in. They completely pull all of the stock um like cooling Hardware off of it fans radiators.
They scrape off all the thermal paste. Everything pull it down to the absolute bare minimum put on some their own custom, designed uh uh like uh heat sinks, uh or water blocks. Sorry, I’m tired, um and, and then they sandwich them together. They make it so that two of these, like these were Quantum 4500s. Two of them is literally that thick wow so like do they have to kind of do they have to kind of 69 them in order to make that work with the i o or what no, they were the same way because they’re not running, i o right. Oh right, okay, fair enough yeah, so it doesn’t matter um but yeah.
So they they put four of these sandwiches of two into one server uh and then they showed like they. They load Linux onto it over the network and then they they have this macro pad. Where they put inputs into Linux that just type out these long commands and they Benchmark it on the spot, they can turn uh the the like water cooling on and off. So they test to make sure the water cooling is working, they put it under load.
They test that blah blah blah they build it all together, super sick and then from there we went to um there’s a really cool way. If you can speak French properly, I call it gravelines. I think they call it like gravity or something I’m gon na that pronunciation is horrible, I’m sorry, but we went to the actual massive Data Center and man. The stuff I couldn’t show on camera was so cool, but the stuff that I could show on camera was also really cool. So it’s okay, it’s still gon na be really interesting.
Okay, but they have like again. The entire place. Is water cooled right right so like the humps and the reservoirs that they have are just crazy like I walked on top of one of their backup reservoirs? One of their many backup reservoirs, they’re reservoirs outside are so gargantuan that I wasn’t even able to show them on camera. They didn’t want to show how they did it. They have heat exchangers that are external to the building, so they they pump all the hot water out, heat exchange it outside and then pump the cold water back in and there’s like a 15 to 20 degree difference in the pipes, you can touch one pipe. That’S coming into the building and it’s like nice and cool it feels chilly, and then you move your hand touch the other one.
It’S like slightly above room temperature, wow, just wild and the whole thing is. The whole thing is crazy: they’re, they’re, um they’re coming for me, they’re uh, they’re, they’re, back up reservoirs. We were able to look into one of them and they have. It looks like a like a super Advanced like borderline Space, Age pool skimmer yeah. They have like these pool skimmers going around.
They have these constant, pH checks because again they’re water cooling, this entire building. So if it gunks like that’s horrifying right um, they have power lines coming into the building that look like you’re receiving power lines into a city. They have 220 000 volt like Industrial Way above the ground power lines that are coming in on Towers into the building. If those fail, they have a bunch of underground 20, 000 volt power lines.
If all of that which is like basically never going to happen. But if all of that goes down, they have a series of these massive generators that they can run for 14 hours straight and each one of the generators they have a bunch of them. Each one of them produces one megawatt of power. What what do they run? On nuclear power – and they don’t even really use them because they have both of the the standard setups for power right right, the the whole thing was just it was uh, it was really it was very cool man I wish I’d gone. I mean I was seeing some reasonably cool stuff too, but not not not quite like that. I forgot to talk about the pumps.
I thought this was actually pretty cool. They had massive pumps, like kind of all around the building right, yeah you’d, see them in a bunch of different locations, but they’re, always in pairs and pretty early on the the guy that was giving me. The main tour um mentioned that they only run one of the two at a time, but they swap every day. The whole data center will will swap to the other pump every day during the work week and then on weekends. They don’t, but they do that to keep the same amount of worked hours on each one and because, if they’re swapping that constantly they’re going to know if it’s working or not so they they reduce failures. That way, there’s a lot of cool little insights like that, but yeah. It’S going to be sweet check out the video when it comes out, but yeah shadow shadow brought us out there to show um what stuff they’ve been doing recently and how they’re doing their power upgrade, and all that all that jazz, which is which is really awesome. They worked with this part, didn’t actually make it into the video at all.
So this is purely additional information, but they worked with Bandai Namco for Elden ring, so when they gave reviewers review copies instead of giving them review copies, they gave them Shadow Cloud. Pcs Golden Ring installed so that way they don’t actually have to distribute the software yeah, so they didn’t have to send them the software, so they didn’t have to worry about it being copied they put watermarks on all the screens that you couldn’t do anything about. So that’s pretty smart there and then Bandai Namco was able to watch all of the reviewers playing their games on like big TV screens back at their office. Oh, that’s, pretty sick totally makes sense.
That’S right! I guarantee you that’s where the entire game review industry is going to go for pre-release, stuff yeah like hey. We noticed that you couldn’t get over that thing uh. This is how to do it.
Uh we’ve discussed it with the team and we’re gon na. Add this indicator to men: yeah huh, that’s genius! Yeah, that’s genius! Uh people are asking on float plane chat is the streaming that good quality I’ve tried out Shadow before it was surprisingly usable, yeah yeah, it’s good. It’S good! .