Inside ATI & NVIDIA: How they make frames fly

Storage & the rest of the Network

Storage is a very important part of NVIDIA's server farm and thus a number of racks were dedicated to storage hardware:

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Each one of the cabinets pictured above were full of hard drives providing an almost unfathomable amount of storage to NVIDIA's servers. When working on design simulations of chips that are made of hundreds of millions of transistors, you not only need an incredible amount of processing power but a great deal of storage as well.

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Once again we see Sun's logo, but this time as a storage server:

As you can guess, it takes a lot of skill, hard work and cabling to keep this sort of a network running and thus we have the fiber optic backbone of NVIDIA's server room:

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The server room is kept surprisingly neat and well organized, impressive considering the sheer number of computers in that room.

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Of course NVIDIA is always expanding, these racks will be full by the time this article is published - another 5,000 CPUs will be hard at work so you can have NV50 in a couple of years.

Of course we have to thank the serverguy for the tour, we made him late to his doctor's appointment but his help was more than appreciated.