7 ms·
Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour
- DiabloD3 3mo agoThats neat.
- burnrate 3mo agoI wonder how much a rack like this costs
- jeffbee 3mo agoWith only 288 128GiB DDR5 ECC DIMMs? I'm sure that doesn't cost much.
- LoganDark 3mo agoIIRC I heard that a single rack is upwards of $600k–$1m, but that was before the AI boom/crisis.
- TZubiri 3mo agoI don't recall if the price was confidential, but I will say that it's higher than that, and that it has been influenced by the RAM cost increase. If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.
- RobLach 3mo agoNeat
- jjice 3mo agoI want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware. Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show. I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.
- convolvatron 3mo agoI've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :) but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
- TZubiri 3mo agoI'd be interested in the context if you'd be willing to share. It sounds from the outside like Oxide has an interview process that requires some low level engineering work to be delivered? Maybe I got that wrong.
- convolvatron 3mo agono, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.
- TZubiri 3mo agoSounds approachable, and something that would be evaluated based on merit. As usual, I'm assuming the assignment is evaluated based on a reasonable time-commitment. From what the recruiting experts tell me, it's a good strategy to spend as much time as possible, the deliverable is better, and the optics aren't bad either, it signals investment into the application instead of signalling spray and pray application broadcasting.
- tonoto 3mo agoOxide is one of very few companies where I felt that it is a company I really want to work for one day. I spent a decent amount of hours answering the questions and sent in the application, but never got any feedback and this was like 2-3 years ago. Spending time at regulated environments, I were in a similar situation that I could not really give out relevant information from the past. However, I have no regrets at all spending the time, as it was very useful for me personally to reflect over each question.
- arjie 3mo agoOh wow, they're on the Epyc 9005 series now. Very cool. Dude, what a monster of a machine that rack is haha. Bloody hell.
- PoignardAzur 3mo agoThe screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.
- benjaminleonard 3mo agoAny console errors? Perhaps drop an issue on the repo if you have a moment: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer/issues
- onefiftymike 3mo agocompletely locked my machine up with Firefox on Linux. Gave up after that.
- ykurtov 3mo agoThat's why I prefer BSD :P
- andrewl-hn 3mo agoThis design feels very obvious-in-hindsight. Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why? Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
- wmf 3mo agoThe vendors did make blades in the 2000s.
- jeffbee 3mo agoAlso, a big cabinet into which you plug varying amounts of hardware capacity, then use the control plane to partition into various virtual resources, describes at least at the conceptual level IBM going back decades.
- creaturemachine 3mo agoI thought surely this isn't just blade servers, that those compute shelves were full of GPUs or something novel, but no just blades reincarnated. I used to support HP's baby version of this, the c3000.
- bri3d 3mo ago> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here. Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example). What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.
- dorongrinstein 3mo agoI met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.
- bcantrill 3mo agoThank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0
- bflesch 3mo agoYour product and company look really cool, I hope you succeed. In the youtube video you've shared there's an interesting section about your values and how trust is needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899 I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis? In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights. But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors. You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL. How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
- xoa 3mo agoAt the time I write this parent comment is grey and I don't think it deserves to be. Some people may be down voting around the blanket statement about "US elites" despite a lot of elites clearly not being ok with the horrendous actions taken this last year, but regardless of that the concerns around dependencies and abuse of power right now are very real and quite justified particularly internationally. There are hard business considerations here as well, the executive unfortunately really does have a lot of power under existing law, particularly with a supine GOP in Congress, to unilaterally disrupt trade and export relationships with other countries, allied or not. It is part of the new business climate. >How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit? Absolutely zero inside knowledge of course, but I think Oxide's approach has intermingled pros and cons. The only real con I can see, but it is a real one, is that one basic argument against unreliability at higher levels is standardization/commoditization. If some big player sells you a standard rack and setup, then gets blocked from further support or otherwise dies, you can just swap in whatever else. Vertical integration and customization offers real benefits but also more dependency, even if things are open unless the niche becomes big enough that other players get interested. On the other hand, the Oxide approach is also positive thanks to that seem openness and integration. They can offer safe software and firmware up and down the stack in a way others cannot. They can offer assurance not just about one piece but around much or all of the stack. I think there's quite a few layers of insecure mystery meat in the standardized stuff most of us run when you start digging down into it. And of course there is no cloud dependency at all, a European organization can buy their kit have full on-premise control no matter what. While the answer for new "3rd party in another jurisdiction can be pressured to screw with you even if you aren't" worries will probably most often be "go to a cloud provider exclusively under your own jurisdiction instead" Oxide seems like they could have a window there as well. If they're honest and give their own customers the power that more and more of the industry has been trying to take away, while also keeping down the IT cost load as a cloud would, that seems like an argument for some?
- dralley 3mo agoIt's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.
- panick21_ 3mo agoThey didn't. They actually said they have huge demand because of AI companies. Turns out, when the AI is surfing the web or using doing other task, that's a CPU. So they also have demand for CPU.
- sunshowers 3mo agoI'm sure you're aware there's a huge amount of computation that isn't matrix multiplication :)
- joshAg 3mo agomay the Sun never set
- dcre 3mo agoSource code here :) https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer
- piker 3mo agoThanks for sharing that. Very cool - was this sales product that you decided to release or has it always been public?
- benjaminleonard 3mo agoSales/marketing. Though there's some ideas floating around on using it to document something like a CRU replacement. We need to get it cross-linked from the main site still.
- piker 3mo agoMakes sense. I was looking for a link from the main site and noticed there wasn't one. A great leave-behind for sales. Nice job.
- Kostic 3mo agoA very beautiful website and a machine. Oxide folks should be proud, you can see the love that went into it.
- ykurtov 3mo agoAbsolutely
- girfan 3mo agoCool tour. I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?
- connicpu 3mo agoHard to compete there when most of the margin is going to NVIDIA, pretty much impossible if you don't have the scale of Dell/Supermicro/etc
- adastra22 3mo agoThe Oxide approach, I think, would be to pick an open interconnect standard and work with one or more NVIDIA competitors to make hardware for it. E.g. AMD and a few of the specialized AI hardware companies. Essentially provide an open TPU standard.
- girfan 3mo agoInteresting. What would the incentives be for NVIDIA, for example, to opt into this? They are building their own racks now, like the NVL72 etc.
- adastra22 3mo agoNone, they won’t. But it would out Oxide into the strong negotiating position, and not at the mercy of NVIDIA. NVIDIA has one primary weakness here: GPUs are NOT optimal hardware for training or inference. No competitor has the market reach to challenge them though. An open standard supported by high growth, breakout startup would change that though.
- _zoltan_ 3mo ago[flagged]
- bradfa 3mo agoCurious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at least allows for replacing the card if it breaks/wears/etc, and mounting the front of the adapter card to a bulkhead should prevent much shifting of the card in the slot. Neat design and reuse of a cheap high speed connector.
- bradfa 3mo agoHow easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and without tools?
- sudomateo 3mo agoThe sleds blind mate to power and network on the backplane so removing the sled will disconnect it. Once the sled is disconnected you pull the fan assembly out and replace it.
- kevinrineer 3mo agoI'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.
- wmf 3mo ago99% of data centers do not have liquid available to the rack. Liquid within the rack doesn't really help.
- schainks 3mo agoNot worth the capex to do that. Air cooling with evaporators up front is pretty standard and works great, not to mention fewer moving parts.
- eep_social 3mo agoInterop standards for this like Open19 are not widely deployed and without interoperability it’s a dead end since you need the hosting provider to give you the drop to your rack or cage. Hyperscalers I don’t know, but I’d guess they don’t deploy rack density that calls for liquid cooling yet.
- jtbaker 3mo agoI don’t think there’s a GPU component so it’s probably a much lower power profile. Also, per this cloudflare write up the Turin gen of the AMD Epycs is very efficient: https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/
- drudolph914 3mo agobig fan of oxide, and love the demo overall, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that these kinds of 3D demos are a bit gimmicky/cheap nowadays. pages like this used to be a signal for a high-end product and or a benchmark for good engineering. now though, we all know that this kind of work can be vibe-coded with threejs fairly quickly if you have the assets. idk ... it feels like it's trying to capture my attention through flashing lights instead of letting the work stand on its own I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases EDIT: typos
- mnsc 3mo agoMy feeling? I ask myself the same question as I do for for everything nowadays. Yeah this might be ai slop, but is it good ai slop? If it's good, like this, I feel good. If it's bad, I feel bad. Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
- drudolph914 3mo agoyeah, I agree with you. I guess the part that feels disingenuous is that these kinds of projects are some-what cashing in on attention from people who still who see threejs slop as "high-effort UIs." this speaks more about me than other ppl, I'm just personally already at the point where all of this feels closer to slop rather than quality. I guess as this trend plays out, we'll all eventually feel somewhat similar on the yet-another-3d-UI-slop trend
- benjaminleonard 3mo agoIIRC the CAD exports were in the many millions of polygons, so there's substantial work in preparing the assets for the explorer. Kenan (the 3d artist I worked with) did fantastic work cleaning and optimising them. I'm somewhat jealous of hardware startups with products without quite so many parts! It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
- piker 3mo agoOxide hitting stride just in time for the memory crisis. I hope they can sustain because they have the coolest stuff, and the podcast is great. I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
- GL26 3mo agoVery instructive on how a computer rack works. I cought only later on that it was Oxide specific, but the design decisions seem so obvious to me that they look like industry standards. What about firmware architecture ? How do you design for reliability ? And how often does an infra like that stop working bc of a hardware problem ? And firmware ?
- prmoustache 3mo agoDo they have customers?
- steveklabnik 3mo agoYes. I believe the first public post about a customer was this one, in 2024: https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawre...
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- zeronone 3mo ago> Intelo Tofino 2 Isn't it decommissioned?
- steveklabnik 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721998
- sandworm101 3mo agoThat is the best in-browser 3d model/website I've seen. It loaded and functioned on my phone perfectly... A first for such things in my experience.
- ksimukka 3mo agooxide gives me hope for the future.
- Aldipower 3mo agoSeems I need a super computer to use this website with Firefox.
- steveklabnik 3mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677980
- aabhay 3mo agoI simply don’t see the value here. At the cost of these systems its inevitable that you hire at least one person full time to manage your rack infra, and that person would likely prefer the customizability of commodity hardware. Source: I run a startup that recently did our datacenter buildout. At no point were we at all interested in a single integrated vendor.
- subarctic 3mo agoWouldn't that person want to have everything work well together so he has less headaches?
- dcre 3mo agoAll we can say is empirically this is not true. Plenty of people whose full time job is managing rack infra are sick and tired of the customizability of commodity hardware, of the many custom bugs in commodity software, and of the customizability of the price of VMware.
- ykurtov 3mo agoYou don't need oxide, you can't afford it, and you're not a target customer.
- aabhay 3mo agoThis is equally true of a company with a bad product?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ksec 3mo agoI didn't know they started shipping Zen 5 already. Hopefully they will be on Zen6 soon after its launch. The Computer Sled is an 2U unit. I am wondering if they could further shrink it to 1U to further increase the compute density. It will probably need a redesign that is water cooling only.
- steveklabnik 3mo agoOxide's sleds don't conform to U sizes directly, IIRC. And even though I'm not there anymore, I can say for sure that it's not going to shrink to 1U: the larger size is very important for other reasons. For example, the larger sled size means larger fans, which means that they can be run at lower speeds, meaning less power draw, less wear and tear, and less noise. > water cooling only. There's some comments above about water cooling, I doubt this will happen, but we'll see I guess.
- 0xB0D 3mo agoI want one Will work for tflops
- Avrio15272 3mo ago[dead]