During previous rounds of testing, Denvr Dataworks was a strong cloud provider with a promising future despite a part-time obsession with immersion cooling. To set aside the claims around the viability of immersion cooling on the technical side, it is also clear that claims regarding the usage of fresh water for cooling in datacenters are way overblown. This is described in detail in this report and this article, which estimate that datacenters in the US used less than 0.15% of the nation’s freshwater last year, depending on how you count it.
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50M gallons per day if counting only cooling
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200-275M gallons per day if counting power but not dam reservoir evaporation
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628M gallons per day if counting evaporation from reservoirs used for hydro power
Compared to the roughly 2 billion gallons of water per day used for golf course irrigation, the 50 million gallons per day on liquid cooling is about 2.4% of the total.
Unfortunately, it seems that much of the original Denvr team has now left the company and GPUs are inaccessible to us when using their website directly.
Can’t spin up a VM without a VPC
Can’t make a VPC without talking to a sysadmin
However, Denvr’s hardware has not disappeared entirely. Instead, it appears Denvr has pivoted to wholesale-only, surfacing its capacity through aggregators and marketplaces. During our testing of the Dstack Sky platform, our job was provisioned on a Denvr Dataworks machine in Houston, Texas via vast.ai. After getting through the turducken of ssh tunnels and into the dstack orchestrated, vast.ai deployed, container running on the Denvr server, we were able to successfully run a multi-GPU (2x H100) RL training job on this hardware. When it works, it works.
In the future we look forward to revisiting the Denvr platform and testing out slurm or kubernetes offerings.