12mo ago

Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat | PC Gamer

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Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat

Ghazi @lemmy.blahaj.zone

squirrel @lemmy.blahaj.zone

12mo ago

Las Vegas' dystopia-sphere, powered by 150 Nvidia GPUs and drawing up to 28,000,000 watts, is both a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat

www.pcgamer.com /hardware/las-vegas-dystopia-sphere-powered-by-150-nvidia-gpus-and-drawing-up-to-28000000-watts-is-both-a-testament-to-the-hubris-of-humanity-and-an-admittedly-impressive-technical-feat/

433 comments

The power of 21000 homes for advertising.
What's most impressive is that it is even legal.
- Or profitable
  
  Is it? Last I‘ve heard it was bleeding money.
- I love this kind of shit. Building things for the sake of it is worth it. Not only as just expression, which may be hubris but it's still expression. Also entertainment, inspiration, pushing the art of engineering, and just giving people something to do, and all the good that comes with that like personal and trade growth.
  A purely utilitarian life is a life only spent on survival. Not a life I want to live.
  
  We can do that, but first let’s make sure everyone on the planet has clean water first.
  
  I understand that perspective, but does it really have to be advertising?
  
  This isn't pushing any boundaries, though. This is off the shelf technology. Anybody can do something big by throwing a shit ton of money at it. It would be pushing boundaries of tech or art if it was for instance super power efficient, or mind bending in any way. This is a fucking sphere, it's the simplest shape and a rip off of the pyramids but less original and not even comparable in terms of durability.
  
  Sure but we’re burning tons of coal to have this thing advertise minion movies, not anything artistic or worthwhile.
- Advertising? This thing is essentially a theater. Yeah, it can run advertisement but anything with a screen can do that. It’s like saying a movie theatre is for advertising.
  
  It's a 400 foot tall screen that's constantly on and in view, even at night, which plays ads like 90% of the time. Calling it "essentially a theatre" is a huge understatement.
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere's power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Ahh yes, energy credits. AKA bullshit.
- We shouldnt call them energy credits, but rather indulgences.
  
  We should call them FRAUD
  
  Somewhere in an ancient crypt, the bones of Luther begin to twitch to life...
- Hey!
  They’re not always BS. Just most of the time!
  Or are they? Some of the companies who are the best at it and seem to be genuinely trying have been shown not to be able to guarantee one way or the other.
  “Wait, someone cut down that forest we planted?!” (no joke)
  Edit: see REC clarification below (thanks!)
  
  Just to be clear, renewable energy credits are different than carbon offsets, and easier to guarantee because they're often tied directly to a metered renewable energy source.
  That said, there are still junk RECs on the market, like those tied to energy that was produced up to 2 decades ago that nobody got around to claiming / retiring. Or RECs tied to energy sources that may have happened regardless of the REC sale.
  
  At least I understand forests that are replanted over and over to be used for lumber, effectively reducing the use of old lumber for myriad products.
- Energy credits — what a bunch of vacuous rhetoric.
  The reality is that it’s energy being taken away from the overall grid, requiring a larger grid and thus prolonging our dependence on non renewable energy while we build up renewable sources.
  If we weren’t so wasteful with our energy we wouldn’t need as much of it and it’d be easier to go fully renewable.
  
  Well this is not good math at all. If you create a project and offset all its power requirements, you haven't added anything to the grid. The alternative is to not do stuff, which is not going to happen anytime soon*, so it's a net good thing and needs to be incentivized, not disparaged.
  *Well it will happen after the water wars and plagues wipe us out, and the sphere will stop drawing any energy at that point.
- Consider ”hate credits”… like imagine the KKK can do whatever it wants so long as they claim to offset it with “hate credits”…
Currently, an agreement is under review to ensure that 70% of the Sphere's power needs will come from solar sources, with the other 30% from non-renewable energy that will be offset by renewable energy credits.
Nevada has pledged to achieve net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, and the solar project under construction to help offset its energy debt is estimated to complete in 2027.
How stupid is it that somebody can claim “Net Zero” greenhouse gas emissions when 30% of their power is greenhouse gas.
Just gonna throw this out there. Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
- We'll also ignore the fact that that solar could have been used to offset actual needs instead of this BS.
  
  If only Las Vegas were located somewhere that the sun shines almost all day every day. \s
  
  Vegas exists because of the BS.
- The word net does a lot of heavy lifting and it’s just a scam
  You can use 100% coal power and claim net zero by buying a forest
- Well you don't understand what "net" means.
  It doesn't mean literally zero. It means colunm A and column B average out to zero.
  To acheive a real net zero, they have to save energy somewhere else that takes that column past 100% (Such as if their solar panels produce more energy than they use during certain times.)
  They probably just make some shit up to say their are saving extra somewhere they aren't (so to that point, yes...credits are bullshit.)
- Fuck credits, charge a carbon tax.
  IMO it seems RECs are a better solution than carbon taxes at least in situations like this. With RECs you're buying renewable energy to offset non-renewables, with a carbon tax the company is just giving the government money for use of non-renewables. Only funds spent on RECs in this case actually go to supporting the renewable energy sector. I'm no expert in this stuff so I could be off, just how I understand it.
- Maybe, I mean just maybe, they can run this thing only as long as the solar generated power lasts, and then turn it off 30% of the time.
  
  Run it at 70% percent brightness.
- Exactly. Carbon credits for the win! I love me some Pigouvian taxes. :)
- They never claimed net zero. They plan to achieve net zero by 2050
  
  Yeah, that’s in the quote. I’m more complaining about the concept of “net zero”.
Las Vegas in general is a testament to the hubris of humanity and an admittedly impressive technical feat. Does it even exist without the Hoover Dam?
- I don't know about power, but Vegas is actually incredibly water efficient. Due to the way the water rights work with the Colorado river, they're not allowed very much, but it doesn't "count" if you put it back in. So nearly every drop they use is treated and put back (probably cleaner, tbh). Boggles the brain, but somehow it's actually a fairly sustainable city. More than any other other major metro, in any event.
  
  Considering they are in a literal desert, they would have to be fairly sustainable to exist in the first place. Not saying it's not super impressive, my dad lived out there when they were building up a lot of the expanded infrastructure and he has some cool stories about how he saw the desert on the outskirts disappear as they added in all the water and transportation stuff
  
  What do other cities do with their wastewater? Isnt that the norm?
- It was also, literally, built by the mob
It's funny, I think Vegas is perfectly fine as the city of sin so things like this really don't phase me. It was built on the idea of crime and excess.
What does seem weird to me is how in a desert, why isn't everything solar? The sun is their only natural resource besides sand. Every rooftop and parking lot and flat surface possible seems like it should be a panel.
- Vegas is surrounded by empty desert, they don't need to use rooftops and parking lots
  
  even deserts host life. it's kind of a ecological misnomer that we could just cover the deserts of the world in solar panels. that would have serious repercussions.
- Solar only works during the day. During night you need batteries which are not renewable. Mining lithium trashes ecosystems and we probably have enough for like 50 more years at this rate, cobalt is extracted through slave labour. And we've seen how well recycling works for other materials which are less complex. So all these renewables aren't all that green in every aspect. Unless we solve the energy storage problem it isn't as simple as putting up more panels.
  
  You know, I'm getting really sick of these comments where people think they know what they're talking about and repeat a bunch of talking points about lithium.
  Lithium is not going to be the basis of a renewable grid. We need it for EVs because it's the best Wh/kg that we have right now, but we don't care so much about weight for grid storage. Cost/kg is the main measure we care about there (though there are some other considerations in specific conditions). We already have tech being deployed in the field that's better than lithium for grid storage. Flow batteries, flywheels, pumped hydro, or just heating up sand or rocks. Others, like sodium batteries, are being manufactured and will probably find their way into real products in the next few years.
  
  Sodium batteries (which are on the market now) are way more environmentally friendly than Lithium batteries.
  The materials are very accessible by comparison to Lithium batteries and they're way more stable.
  
  https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery
28,000,000 watts
That's usually written as 28MW. I know some Americans don't like metric much, but one of the points of metric is that you don't ever need to write that many zeroes - you just need to use the right prefix (kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc) on the unit.
- True, but 28 million watts really puts things in perspective when your average PSU is less than 1000w.
  
  Exactly. This is literally a PC gamer article. Writing it out like that really puts it into perspective for the average reader.
  
  That's true.
  average PSU is less than 1000w
  Unrelated but I wish it was easier to find lower-wattage PSUs. My local PC store doesn't have anything under 650W. I know modern GPUs use a lot of power, but not all PCs use a GPU! I have a home server where 400W would be more than enough, yet the smallest I could find was 550W, in stock from just one manufacturer (Be Quiet).
  
  Way easier to compare 28MW to 1KW.
- you just need to use the right prefix (kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc) on the unit.
  Oh, thanks.
  Bruh, it's PC Gamer.
  quick edit: Hey! Why aren't you converting it to Joules?
  
  Because Joule is the SI unit of energy, meanwhile the Watt is the SI unit of power, equivalent to one Joule per second.
  "Converting" joules to watts would be like converting m/s to US dollars.
- They say there are 16 screens inside, each with a 16k resolution. Such a screen would have 16x as many pixels as a 4k screen. The GPUs power those as well.
  For the number of GPUs it appears to make sense. 150 GPUs for the equivalent of about 256 4k screens means each GPU handles +-2 4k screens. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it could make sense.
  The power draw of 28 MW still seems ridiculous to me though. They claim about 45 kW for the GPUs, which leaves 27955 kW for everything else. Even if we assume the screens are stupid and use 1 kw per 4k segment, that only accounts for 256 kW, leaving 27699 kW. Where the fuck does all that energy go?! Am I missing something?
  
  This is a complete shot in the dark but could the huge power draw come from needing some intense industrial cooling/airflow stuff in/on the sphere?
  Edit: forgot a word
  
  Yeah, 4k phone and 4k plasma tv don't consume same ammount of energy.
- Says 16K, where’s the disconnect? (I don’t know display tech)
- That's the outside. The inside is 256 million pixels.
And a waste of electricity?
- I believe that's implied in the "hubris" bit.
- Its one of the smaller atrocities in Vegas, particularly when compared to the Bellagio Fountain or the food waste generated by all those casino dining halls.
  
  The fountains aren't quite as wasteful as they seem. They use a lot of water compared to a house, but way less than some car washes.
- Yeah we should have never invented televisions or records either! And don't even get me started on cell phones. Just waste waste waste.
  Why, if it were up to me we would all still be hunting and gathering!
  
  Apples to oranges dude, this is for pure spectacle that wears off after five minutes. Plus any data gained from it was at the lab they prototyped it I believe in Burbank. This aint really a sign of progress, and itll be funny to see what happens to it when it inevitably breaks.
I don't know what they need so many GPUs for. There's 16 displays inside, and the sphere itself has fewer pixels than even 1 of the internal displays. You could probably run the sphere off a laptop if you aren't trying to do anything fancy.
Maybe they plan on doing crazy live simulations on it or something. I can't imagine what kind of displayed image would actually use all 150 of them. Nvidia A6000 cards are damn powerful.
- Probably have a few cards running the displays and the rest of them mining some sphere-themed memecoin
- I guess the practicality of the decision depends on the finances. Did they actually buy the cards or were they gifted by nvidia for free advertising?
  
  It does seem suspiciously like they picked 150 completely arbitrarily to make the project sound impressive, when they could have easily done it with 20. I'm sure a bunch of people in the middle made a bunch of money off that transaction too. Or like you said, maybe this is Nvidia doing some guerrilla marketing
- Pretty sure it's just for bragging rights.
- You don't know. Full stop.
  
  My job has been to run things on GPUs for almost 10 years now. The only thing anyone practical is doing on that many GPUs is AI training, massive scientific simulations, or crypto mining. 1 or 2 of them is enough to run something like ChatGPT.
  Real-time graphics it turns out don't scale well across multiple GPUs. There's a reason SLI has gone away for consumer GPUs. At the current ratio, each of those $3000+ GPUs is only driving 8000 pixels (assuming each led puck is being used as 1 pixel, given their size). It makes no sense other than bragging rights
Add a solar array and battery bank, a you might even have electricity left over. It’s in the desert after all.
- Still a waste of energy because that could be used for the general grid
  
  I wouldn’t say entertainment is a waste of energy even if there are nobler uses for the power.
  
  There wouldn't be an incentive or the capital necessary to instigate the build out of solar without the sphere. Yes, it would be great if someone did that. But the owners of the sphere specifically have a financial incentive to do so for the sake of lower energy costs. There's not a lack of land or sun, so whether they do or do not doesn't amount to a "waste" of energy - anyone else can build out solar production too.
  
  I saw several concerts there and it was awesome. You want to live a life without anything fun in it?
- Have you ever seen a solar array that gives 28 MW?
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
  
  Is it bigger or smaller than a football field?
  
  110MW https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
  392MW https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
  These are both near Vegas.
- allow me to remind you about ✨opportunity costs ✨
I hope the name “dystopia sphere” catches on.
Is the 'dystopia-sphere' trying to compete with the torment nexus or something?
- Thunderdome was already taken
Using the max power use of a video card to math this is ridiculous. It's not at full TDP pushing this content. They aren't playing max FPS 3D raytraced gaming, they're playing videos.
- What.
  The article says that, for the GPUs, they can have a "maximum power draw of 45,000 W at full tilt".
  The 28 million W comes from the full system, and surely the massive displays, LEDs and eventually sound system makes up the bulk of that, the gfx cards are a rounding error...
- Synchronizing that many screens into one/two continuous displays is not light computing work. Roughly every square foot is its own panel in commercial displays.
If they reversed it (displays inside), it would be the best immersive gaming setup ever.
Edit: looks like they are inside.
- That’s what it is on the inside.
  
  Wait, the article says it's "internal displays" but the picture shows images on the outside of the globe?
- Except it has the worst pixel density ever
  
  9.818127340823 should be the pixel density if my numbers are correct.
  The numbers i was able to find(please correct if these numbers are not accurate)
  160,000 sqft display converted to inches 23040000 sq/inch
  16K x 16K resolution equals 15360 pixels x 15360 pixels So thats 235,929,600 pixels
  Various Notes.
  a 55-inch 4K television, which has a pixel density of only 80.11ppi
  iphone 12 - 360ppi
  14,000ppi MicroLED display is world’s densest, only 0.48mm across june 2019 approximately the size of a ladybug
Might as well just give up on the earth right now I guess
It would be impressive it could be done without destroying our planet. This should impress no one.
A bomb that could destroy Earth's core would be an admittedly impressive technical feat!
- Nono, the bombs starts the earths core
  
  WAVE PROPIGATION
  
  The Core appreciators... UNITE!
I mean it is cool. But really a testament to why we deserve extinction at this point...
That article gets stuck so much and makes my (relatively high end) laptop's fan scream so hard you'd think the website was designed for that kind of hardware.
Wouldn't just one GPU be enough to run the Sphere, or a I getting something wrong?
I remember hearing about that it's not exactly high resolution, each "pixel" being a bunch of pretty large lamps.
- Wikipedia says it's 16,000x16,000 (which is way less than I thought). The way the math works, that's 16x as big as a 4k monitor, so 16 GPUs would make sense. And there's a screen inside and one outside, so double that. But I also can't figure out why it needs five times that. Redundancy? Poor optimization? I dunno.
  
  But wouldn't that be only necessary if it needed to render real-time graphics at such a scale? If I'm correct, all its doing is playing back videos.
  
  I'm guessing it's the department of redundancy department, is my guess.
  
  I work for a digital display company, and it is definitely redundancy. There will be at least two redundant display systems that go to the modules separately so they can switch between them to solve issues. If a component fails on one side they just switch to the other.
- The way I think it, it's possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you'd just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.
  Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there's also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.
Ok, so it's "capable of drawing" enough power for 20,000 homes in the area. How much does it actually use day to day? Does it dim at night and brighten in the daytime to keep those ads rolling in the sunshine?
Useless
That pretty much describes all of Vegas.
I guess they dont need to pay for heating when you have a bunch of high power computers pumping out a crap ton of heat
- It also helps that it's in Las Vegas.
- Those displays must dump a ton more of heat.
And unless it displays a picture of Mr. House it's all for naught
In 2030 this will just be the standard system requirements for AAA games because optimization is hard.
- because optimization ~~is hard~~ costs money and they dont have enough from the 60 USD you paid
  
  70*
At every stage of it’s life cycle; the Sphere has been the dumbest thing imaginable
And because some rich people got scammed into buying in now everyone has to advertise it
They tried to build this abomination in London and it got shot down.
- Before the Sphere, the largest spherical building in the world (since 1989) was the Globe in Stockholm.
  On it they sometimes project stuff on, which seems to be a way cheaper and energy efficient way than adding a billion LEDs.
  Fun fact about the arena Globen, it's actually the biggest piece in a art installation about our solar system, representing the sun. Pluto is about halfway up in Sweden.
  It's also the home arena of Swedens national ice hockey team.
"Capable of drawing 28,000,000 watts of power" doesn't tell us anything. As was noted, it should've been given in megawatts (28 mW) or kilowatts (28,000 kW). Clickbait aside, how many kilowatt-hours (kWh) does it actually use?
28 mW isn't that much energy, relatively speaking. As of 2015, Forbes estimated LV uses 8000 mW on an average summer day.
The potential is impressive. I doubt it pulls anywhere near that. Unless I did my math wrong, this seems sensationalist.
- Just Fyi, mW is milliwatts, and MW is megawatts. Agreed though, I doubt it draws that much day to day.
  
  Thank you, I stand corrected!
- I don't get it, are they implying that each GPU can draw 200kW? a home is like 10 max. Wtf is a gpu that can consume more power than 20 homes? Mine at home draws peak 300W...
  Each of those GPUs feature over 10,752 cores, 48 GB of memory and have a 300 W TDP, for a grand total of 1,612,800 cores, 7,200 GB of GDDR6 memory, and a potential maximum power draw of 45,000 W at full tilt (via Wccftech).
  ok, monster gpus, got it.
We need more nuclear power ASAP
- There's no such thing as "ASAP" for nuclear power. If you had the permits signed off today, it would take 10 years before a single GWh of new nuclear energy goes to the grid.
  Instead, maybe we shouldn't build giant spherical advertising displays?
  
  There's no such thing as "ASAP" for nuclear power
  Sure there is. It's just that the P stands for "20 years from now."
- Vegas is almost entirely powered by the hoover dam. It's already pretty green as far as energy goes. The question will be where do they get their power from in a few years when lake mead dries up.
  
  That's not true. The Hoover Dam contributes to Vegas's power supply, but it's nowhere near "almost entirely powered" by the dam, except in Fallout: New Vegas.
  
  In addition to the other thing, dams have a dramatic and disastrous impact on the ecology in the immediate area and the entire riparian system they connect to. It's "green" in terms of emissions but they're still harmful and we should be phasing them out for lower impact alternatives as much as possible.
So how is the total power over 500x that of the GPU power? If it's all LEDs, that thing must get brighter than the damn sun.
- Funny enough you can barely see it during the day
Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.
Normally I'd be suspicious of these kinds of megastructure projects but Vegas is the city that figured out how to get damn close to net zero water use from the Colorado so I'm willing to start off with the benefit of the doubt for the city leaders that ok'd this.
Kinda feels like humanity is in the process of jumping the shark on this one
- It's the last season anyway
someone pay to put the Lemmy logo on it, i heard there was a way to pay for an image to show up
28 MW? What are they doing in there, aluminum?
Shame
You all go ooo and aaaa then yell at oil companies for climate change.
- The power usage wouldn't be a problem if the electricity were generated in a green way.
  If only the energy sector had a workforce experienced in building offshore structures that could build offshore wind farms. And maybe a workforce that had experience in drilling that could develop geothermal energy.
  Of course we also need an energy sector that had a lot of financial resources to put into these kinds of investments.
  If only the energy sector had these kinds of resources, a big sphere drawing a lot of electricity wouldn't be a problem.
  
  As an industry insider, can tell you old oil and gas wells are being converted to geothermal where possible. There is lots of innovation in the works!
The non-stop anti-humanity propaganda is exhausting.
God you guys cant have any fun. Yeah it uses power but cant we have cool things once and awhile?
The whole uses lots of energy therefore bad argument is complete bullshit. Energy usage is directly proportional to technological development and technology is effectively human evolution.
- Good luck, you are talking to people who think that if the billionaires passed out all their money to everyone, then we would all be able to afford way more stuff. They have no idea that more cash doesn't mean way more products appear. Supply and demand is such a simple concept, but to them, it might as well be rocket science.
  
  Imagine being so naive as to believe massive wealth hording deprived others! What turkeys! Amirite?
  
  Who's they? Are you schizophrenic?

433 comments