Algorithm system

Old mining cardWhen Lin Yuan was woken up by the noise outside the window, he found himself slumped over his desk. He didn’t know when he fell asleep last night, but the laptop screen was still on, displaying a pop-up message indicating automatic logout due to remote login timeout.

Ignoring his groggy head, he logged back into the virtual machine assigned to him by the company, which was equipped with an A100 computing card.

“Shit!”

Even though the A100’s computing power far surpassed most graphics cards on the market, it still struggled like a small horse pulling a large cart when training the AI model for path and delivery problems. Lin Yuan had only set a very standard thousand-cycle training loop, but when he woke up in the morning, he found that there were still over five hundred cycles left to run.

At this training speed, the A100 would not be able to complete more than 1500 training cycles in a 24-hour period. However, algorithms need continuous iteration; they aren’t finished after a few thousand or tens of thousands of runs.

So, Lin Yuan faced an awkward situation: his computing system was powerful, but it lacked sufficient computing power. The company’s A100 could be used freely, but it wasn’t powerful enough.

The problem was clear, and the next step was naturally to find targeted solutions.

Regarding Problem One: Insufficient computing power in the computing system. Lin Yuan could either wait for the system to settle his enrollment task rewards after the official start of school, thereby obtaining a computing power supplement. But in that case, his internship at Good Group would most likely not be kept. Because without outstanding work results, Good Group had no reason to sign a part-time contract with a current graduate student.

There was also another method: Jing exhausted to death.

As long as Lin Yuan could endure three times a day, computing power should not be an issue.

But this method was naturally the first to be ruled out by Lin Yuan.

That left only Problem Two: The A100 is not powerful enough, so he had to find a solution for that.

Problem Two was essentially a money problem. Because if Lin Yuan had enough money in his pocket, he could spend a million or so to buy a few H100s, which are much more powerful than A100s. But at this moment, Lin Yuan’s Alipay balance wasn’t even enough to buy a corner of an H100.

Apply to Hao Tuan Company again for computing equipment? Save it, he was already lucky to get an A100. Computing cards are so expensive these days, why would they give one to an intern? Tell the head of the technical department that he is helping Good Group iterate on the food delivery algorithm? Unless Lin Yuan brought out the algorithm right now, no one would believe him.

After much thought, Lin Yuan finally thought of his mentor—Professor Zhang.

Lin Yuan didn’t go directly to Professor Zhang. Although Professor Zhang occasionally asked about his internship at Hao Tuan Company, Lin Yuan didn’t want to be abrupt, so he first went to Senior Brother Liu to test the waters.

After Lin Yuan stated his intention, “Can I borrow some computing equipment?”, Senior Brother Liu readily agreed.

Then Senior Brother Liu took Lin Yuan to a graduate laboratory in the computer science department, pointed to a certain iron box, and said, “You can take this machine for now.”

Lin Yuan curiously examined the machine. It was an iron box similar to a computer case, but from its appearance, it was clearly not a computer case.

“Senior Brother, what is this?”

“Computing equipment. Oh, this is definitely different from what you saw at Good Group. The school has limited funds and can’t get too many advanced computing cards. Usually, they just approve some money for students to tinker with and assemble themselves.”

As he spoke, Lin Yuan had already opened the cover of the iron box.

He saw the internal structure of the iron box—two circuit boards vertically inserted into a very large green PCB board.

Lin Yuan had disassembled computer cases before, and he knew what a computer motherboard looked like. However, the large green PCB board in front of him had few electronic components. Compared to the densely packed layout on a computer motherboard, large areas of this PCB board were empty.

If the component layout on a computer motherboard was as crowded as a major international city, then this PCB board was a quiet little village, with enough space between components to fit several fingers.

Lin Yuan didn’t immediately understand why this PCB board was like this. However, he recognized the two circuit boards vertically inserted into the PCB board.

“If I’m not mistaken, these two… should be… graphics cards, right?”

The front of the two circuit boards had two large fans, and from the faded silk screen, the letters GTX could be faintly seen.

“That’s right. This one is a 1660, and that one is a 1060.”

Lin Yuan’s heart sank, “Senior Brother, so this is…”

Seeing Lin Yuan’s hesitant expression, Senior Brother Liu said frankly, “You guessed correctly, this is a mining rig.”

“Uh… okay.” Lin Yuan was at a loss for words.

“Oh, you’ll get used to it later. The school has limited funds and can’t be as generous as commercial companies. This one was modified by your senior brothers using a mining rig motherboard they found and discarded mining cards from a mining farm. The performance is a bit lacking, but it’s cheap. It’s enough for you to practice and run training.”

Lin Yuan stared blankly at the mining rig.

Judging from the mottled solder joints on the back of these two graphics cards, they must have endured a lot. Who knows how many fierce battles they had experienced, how many days and nights they had run continuously, soaring in the ocean of bitcoin, galloping on the Ethereum virtual machine, and possibly even intertwined with that dead Shiba Inu from dogecoin.

Their limbs (peripheral components) seemed to have been replaced many times, and their hearts (CUDA cores) were mostly no longer their own.

Lin Yuan suddenly felt a surge of emotion in his heart.

Ah!

You have heard the rushing waters of Sichuan and felt the biting cold winds of the north. Some of your companions may still be fighting in cold Siberia.

(PS: If I remember correctly, the hydropower in Bashu has obvious seasonality, and the wind power in Monan also seems to. As for Siberia, no additional cooling is needed there. And what is most needed for digital currency output…)

You are like two unyielding warriors, still burning yourselves for the Republic’s scientific research in your old age.

I admire your nobility.

But your computing power is really too weak.

Even if these two graphics cards were brand new, their combined computing power wouldn’t be worthy of carrying the shoes of an A100.

Senior Brother Liu giving him such a crappy machine was unexpected for Lin Yuan, but also within reason. After all, he hadn’t officially enrolled yet, and the other party, following conventional thinking, must have thought he was just doing some small projects to practice.

Lin Yuan couldn’t tell Senior Brother Liu about his idea of iterating on the food delivery algorithm. He was afraid the other party would find him too astonishing. Moreover, after seeing the layout of the computer laboratory in front of him, with scattered circuit boards and messy network cables, Lin Yuan didn’t think Senior Brother Liu could help him much.

If he begged the other party again, at most he would get a few more graphics cards. But even if all eight slots on that large PCB board were filled with graphics cards, what then? Old GTX 1 series graphics cards with 6GB of memory, even eight of them combined, wouldn’t be worthy of carrying the shoes of an A100.

Unless those eight slots were all filled with 4090 graphics cards.

But Lin Yuan obviously didn’t dare to ask for that, because he still had some self-respect.