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Applied Digital Data Centers Support the High-Performance Computing Industry

March 29—Jamestown—Applied Digital Corporation's next-generation data centers are being built to support the growing high-performance computing industry, Applied Digital Corporation is building a 5-MW facility near Jamestown and Allendale, North America, to provide high-performance computing solutions for the rapidly growing HPC industry. The facility will house the graphics processing units and will be separate from the company’s other buildings. Applied Digital changed its name from Applied Blockchain to more accurately reflect its services and broader business offerings to serve customers in need of large computing-powered applications. The 5 MW facility is designed to provide ultra-low-cost and high-efficiency infrastructure for HPC, and full-scale operations are expected from the facility soon.

Applied Digital Data Centers Support the High-Performance Computing Industry

Publicados : 12 meses atrás por no Finance

March 29—Jamestown—Applied Digital Corporation’s next-generation data centers are being built to support the growing high-performance computing industry, according to Regina Ingle, chief marketing officer.

Applied Digital has facilities near Jamestown and Allendale. About 7 miles north of Jamestown is a 100 MW facility slated to become operational in 2022. Applied Digital announced on March 7 that the 180 MW facility at Allendale had been activated.

The total contracted capacity for Applied Digital is approximately 500 MW.

Applied Digital, which is headquartered in Dallas, is building a 5-MW facility next to its 100-MW hosting facility north of Jamestown. The plan is for the new facility to host the development of more traditional high-performance computing applications such as natural language processing, machine learning, and other high-performance computing applications.

The 5 MW facility is planned for energization in the first quarter of 2023.

Applied Digital, formerly Applied Blockchain Inc., designs, develops and operates next-generation data centers in North America to provide digital infrastructure solutions for the rapidly growing high-performance computing (HPC) industry, according to its website. Applied Digital’s clients include Bitmain and Marathon Digital Holdings.

“We have customers who come in and they effectively rent, lease the space from us,” Ingel said. “So we get their equipment, we set it up, we plug it in and then we run it, but we don’t mine any cryptocurrency. We don’t own bitcoin mining equipment, so it’s hasn’t changed.”

Applied Digital changed its name from Applied Blockchain to more accurately reflect its services and broader business offerings to serve customers in need of large computing-powered applications, according to a news release on its website.

“We felt it appropriate to remove blockchain from the name because really we are more than a one-pony,” Ingel said.

Ingel said North Dakota is good for Applied Digital. He said the cold climate was a big factor in the state deciding to build the facilities.

Being in North Dakota allows the company to save money on installing air-conditioning units and electricity, said Nick Phillips, executive vice president of hosting operations and public affairs.

“Some people also do evaporative cooling which means they use water and they spray water in the air and it evaporates causing cooling,” he said. “We don’t even have to do that. So we don’t use water or electricity like would have to do in Arizona, for example.”

Philips said North Dakota is one of the more stringent electrical jurisdictions in the US

“It’s positive because we end up creating a very high standard from an electrical point of view for what we do,” he said. “From a regulatory standpoint, North Dakota has been great. There are a lot of people in the state who are very excited to work with us and help us get the permits and deal with all the different issues that come up.”

The 5-MW facility will be designed and purposely built to house the graphics processing units and will be separate from the company’s other buildings. This is Applied Digital’s first HPC hosting facility. The 16,382-square-foot building has been designed to provide ultra-low-cost and high-efficiency infrastructure for HPC.

Once the 5-MW facility is complete, it is expected to move into a pilot program with 300 graphics processing units, with an initial customer launch in the first quarter of 2023, according to a news release on the project’s website. Full-scale operations are expected from the facility soon. The first client is expected to primarily use the capabilities of machine learning.

Philips said the 5 MW facility is large enough to host HPC applications. He said that there are very few such facilities in the US.

He said that the equipment for mining cryptocurrency and blockchain uses application-specific integrated circuits. For mining, he said application-specific integrated circuits are purposely built to validate the blockchain and transactions.

Philips said the machines in the 5 MW facility will be used for a variety of purposes and the HPC includes graphics processing units.

“High-performance compute has what’s called a GPU, so they’re like graphic cards for playing video games, so they’re really good at doing math,” Phillips said. “They can be used for different things, so they can be used for machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks and you name it. There are dozens of different types of applications.”

An application like ChatGPT — an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI — finds available data, feeds it into a computer system like Applied Digital’s and learns from what it reads, he said.

“In the case of ChatGPT, they learned from millions of articles,” he said. “Now when you ask it a question, … it knows how to answer questions by reading a lot of text. … If you want to ask a question or write something for you or have a conversation with someone Somehow, all these kinds of HPC apps can be run there.”

He said HPC could be used for medical, gene or protein sequencing, drug discovery or other online artificial intelligence systems. He said Tesla’s self-driving cars use some sort of artificial intelligence that learns from videos of people crossing the road or vehicles in order to keep individuals safe.

“All of those types of systems have to use computer systems that do artificial intelligence or machine learning or other things,” he said.

Ingel said Applied Digital has 37 employees in North Dakota and a large portion in Jamestown. He said that Ellendale is not yet fully staffed.

“The pool of individuals who have any background and experience in this particular industry because it’s so specialized, it’s so small,” she said.

He added that Applied Digital has created an internal training program with the expectation that any incoming employees will need the training. The company is all about promoting internally, he said.

“We are looking for entry level positions and we will train you as our company (in) these facilities, there is absolutely a place where you can simply continue to grow and build your career internally with us,” He said.

Phillips said hiring for the Allendale location has been challenging.

“We have a lot of open positions and they are entry level positions and we do all the training,” he said. “We have a very robust in-house training program available for those who wish to apply for our entry-level positions at Ellendale.”

Ingel said working with Applied Digital is at the forefront of a new era of technology that is emerging.

“Our team is building the digital infrastructure for these future applications, and it’s very exciting,” he said.

For more information on Applied Digital visit


Tópicos: Cryptocurrency

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