174: Chapter 174 A Standard Answer

September 29th, 10:47 PM.

Low Entropy Workshop Beijing R&D Center.

A new message popped up in the delivery group chat.

Chen Zhi took a screenshot of the machining supplier's original words.

["How many are expected for the next batch? If we can confirm in advance, we can reserve an earlier machining window."]

Chen Yan saw the message, but he couldn't spare a hand to reply.

With both hands, he was holding the thirty-second CMP 170HX, slowly pulling it out of the anti-static bag.

Faint scratches left by repeated disassembly and assembly lingered on the edge of the board, the label had turned yellow, and blue marks left by mining farm operation and maintenance personnel could still be seen around the fixing screws.

It had once performed hash calculations day and night in a certain mining farm, but now, with the mining boom receding, the entire batch of equipment was being cleared out and treated as useless assets.

Chen Yan placed it into the test rig.

Clamp it down, lock it, and connect the auxiliary power supply.

After over four consecutive hours of field testing in the utility tunnel, he followed the project team to complete the hatch opening inspection, raw data verification, and equipment transfer, not returning to the R&D Center until 9 PM.

Chen Yan washed his hands, changed into anti-static clothing, and sat down in front of another workbench.

On the west side of the room stood four 4U servers whose covers had not yet been closed.

Eight cards per unit.

The power supplies, adapter cables, and high-speed fan modules were packed separately in numbered turnover boxes.

Two sets of rack-mounted storage were placed against the wall, with labels on the outside of the packaging indicating capacity, interfaces, and verification status.

This newly put-into-use R&D Center had still appeared empty a few days ago.

Now, servers, instruments, shipping boxes, and turnover racks had taken up most of the space.

Chen Yan pressed the start button of the test rig.

The power indicator light lit up.

The cursor on the screen paused for a few seconds, then began to scroll.

The last 170HX finished powering on.

[GPU: GA100]

[HBM2e: 10GB]

[Bus Width: 5120-bit]

[PCIe Link: Gen1 × 4]

Chen Yan stared at the screen and filled the last set of data into the inspection sheet.

Thirty-two rows of records were neatly arranged.

The same chip identification.

The same video memory capacity.

The same bus width.

Only the twenty-ninth row was marked yellow.

"Director Jiang, the basic identification is complete."

Jiang Lin raised his head from in front of another terminal.

Chen Yan switched the inspection sheet to the shared screen.

"In the same batch, all thirty-two cards are 10GB and 5120-bit. Card No. 29 failed to complete initialization in the first two cold boots and only succeeded on the third; I have marked it separately."

"What about the rest?"

"The identification results are consistent; no obvious abnormalities were found in the power supply interface, board version, and bandwidth test."

Chen Yan pulled up the boot records of Card No. 29.

During the first two boots, the exact same error prompt remained on the screen.

The device had completed powering on, but the host had not received a complete resource mapping.

After the third boot, everything returned to normal.

This kind of intermittent fault was the most troublesome.

Devices that were completely damaged could be directly eliminated.

But devices that occasionally succeeded would send all the problems back at the most inappropriate time.

Chen Yan paused for a moment, choosing his subsequent words more carefully.

"They were originally only used in mining environments, and existing drivers have very limited support for general-purpose computing. According to training card standards, it cannot yet be determined whether they can be used."

Jiang Lin opened the record for Card No. 29.

[C170-29]

[Cold Boot Abnormalities: 2]

[Third Initialization Successful]

His finger paused on the status bar for two seconds.

Afterward, he changed the device status from [Computing Candidate] to another option.

[Allow Failure]

Chen Yan immediately synchronized this in the inspection sheet.

He did not feel any pity for this board worth over 10,000 yuan.

Before the real destructive testing began, proactively stipulating which equipment could be damaged was more important than looking for reasons after the damage occurred.

While saving the modifications, Chen Yan noticed the silver-gray shipping box placed alone on the other side of the room.

The box lid was already open.

Lying inside was an A100 PCIe computing card.

The 40GB video memory version.

The shock-absorbing foam had no obvious indentation, and no dust marks left from long-term use could be seen on the metal casing.

The accompanying inspection report, serial number, and ownership documents were pressed inside a transparent file bag, forming an overly stark contrast with the old cards stripped back from the mining farms around them.

A usage label was affixed to the outside of the shipping box.

[Benchmark Reference]

Chen Yan's gaze lingered on the A100 for a moment, then swept across the four servers behind him.

"Director Jiang, is this A100 also going to enter the same test environment?"

"Correct."

"Driver versions, load scripts, and recording channels are all unified?"

"Yes."

"Understood."

Chen Yan withdrew his gaze and continued to check the power distribution.

He did not press Jiang Lin on what he was preparing to compare.

After joining the Low Entropy Workshop, he had personally disassembled G-01C, and also participated in field tests at Hengtai mines and underground utility tunnels.

On the scree slope of Hengtai, he was responsible for recording the foot-end load and spindle current.

At the entrance of the underground utility tunnel, he was responsible for checking the thermal path, sealed cabin, and mission cabin.

At the end of each test, he could take on a bit more work than the last time.

Yet the more he saw, the better he could distinguish what he had already mastered and how far he still was from the core of the entire system.

The mechanical architecture, motion control, safety state machine, and thermal management path of G-01C were all built by Jiang Lin.

He was responsible for turning a part of them into repeatable tests, leaving the faults in the logs, and then completing reproduction according to the boundaries drawn by Jiang Lin.

This work was inconspicuous.

The 5.63 kilometers in the utility tunnel were pieced together precisely from countless such reproductions, records, and corrections.

The same was true for this batch of mining cards before his eyes.

Since Jiang Lin specifically bought an A100 as a benchmark, he must have already seen some difference worth verifying between the two types of hardware.

Chen Yan could not see that path for the time being; what he could do was ensure that every piece of data left by the thirty-two cards could withstand re-verification.

He opened the power distribution table of the four servers and said, "There is one more item that needs your confirmation."

A power budget appeared on the screen.

"With eight cards per server, along with the host, power loss, and fans, a full load is close to three kilowatts. The current power distribution and cooling conditions of the Beijing R&D Center cannot support all four at full load simultaneously."

"We are not doing full load tonight."

"Then I will only complete low-power enumeration and basic identification."

"Mm."

"How many destructive samples should be reserved?"

"Four."

Chen Yan took out red labels from the drawer.

Number One.

Number Nine.

Number Twenty-one.

Number Twenty-nine.

Four cards were removed from the original testing queue.

[Allow Disassembly]

[Allow Failure]

When the red label of Card No. 29 was affixed, it happened to cover half of the blue mark left by the mining farm.

The remaining twenty-eight cards were uniformly marked as: [Computing Candidate]

At 11:20 PM, all basic testing concluded.

The high-speed fans gradually stopped spinning, and the sharp wind sound that had persisted in the room for over half an hour finally subsided.

Chen Yan took off his anti-static wrist strap.

He saved the equipment numbers, interface photos, cold boot records, and raw logs into a read-only directory, and re-checked the number of files.

Thirty-two cards, thirty-two sets of raw records.

Four destructive samples.

"Director Jiang, the complete inspection report will be sent to you tomorrow morning. Are there any other arrangements?"

"None, you can go back and rest."

"Alright."

Chen Yan put away his screwdriver and multimeter, walked to the door, and with his hand already resting on the doorknob, he remembered the work meal placed outside.

Turning back, he placed the meal box within Jiang Lin's reach.

A thin layer of water vapor condensed on the plastic box lid.

"I heated it up once just now, but it might have gotten cold again."

Jiang Lin glanced at the meal box.

"Got it, thanks."

Chen Yan gently pulled the room door shut.

The footsteps in the hallway gradually faded away.

Jiang Lin unpacked the meal box.

The rice had clumped back together, and a thin layer of oil had coagulated on the surface of the vegetable juice.

He used his chopsticks to break apart the rice bit by bit, took a few bites, and once again pulled up the mining equipment disposal list received on September 21st.

What initially attracted him to the attachment was the price.

On September 15th, Ethereum completed its merge.

The huge computing power demand originally used to support mining lost its reason for continued existence in a short period of time.

Mining farms everywhere began dismantling machines, warehouses were piled high with graphics cards, and quotes in the second-hand market were slashed several times a day.

Equipment that previously required pulling strings and paying a premium to buy suddenly turned into inventory eager to be unloaded.

This batch of 170HX was among them.

The seller required batch processing.

[Quantity: 32]

[Total Price: 432,000 yuan]

[No Separate Sales]

[No Promise of General-Purpose Computing Use]

[Only Guarantees Passing Original Miner Self-Test]

[Includes 72-Hour Power-On Records]

Averaged out across thirty-two mining cards, each only cost a little over 13,000 yuan.

A few months ago, this price would have been hard pressed to buy even a single ordinary consumer-grade high-end graphics card.

Jiang Lin opened the equipment table.

An identification screenshot among them made his mouse stop.

10GB video memory.

5120-bit bus.

More common in public teardown data were the 8GB, 4096-bit versions.

That kind of 170HX only enabled four sets of HBM channels; although the specifications were extreme, they could still be explained by the product positioning of a mining card.

The batch in the seller's hands was different.

5120 bits meant that all five sets of channels were working.

The accompanying bandwidth test also confirmed this.

This batch of cards could still maintain a video memory throughput close to 1.5 TB per second, far higher than ordinary consumer-grade graphics cards.

The retained bus width was the same as the A100.

The capacity that could be presented externally was only 10GB.

The PCIe link stopped at Generation 1 x4.

The general-purpose computing power was also restricted to a position extremely disproportionate to the scale of the GA100.

Capacity.

Link.

Computing.

The restrictions fell on three different parts, yet the proportions presented were overly neat.

This did not look like a chip having a part randomly broken during the manufacturing process.

Random defects would not so strictly adhere to product specifications.

Jiang Lin requested three things from the seller.

Unmodified raw device logs.

Configuration space dumps.

Complete cold boot records of three cards from the same batch.

When the seller replied the first time, they were only willing to provide test screenshots.

During the second communication, the other party agreed to provide the 72-hour power-on report, but still refused to hand over the raw files.

Jiang Lin paid additional testing fees, allowing the deletion of the mining farm name, equipment location, operation shift, and real timestamp, only requiring that different channels must retain the same relative time zero point.

Two days later, three desensitized logs were sent to Beijing.

When he opened the logs for the first time, what he saw was still a broken chain.

The card had completed powering on.

Safety firmware completed initialization.

The host driver received a processed resource table.

As for where the resource table was generated from, which values came from fuses, and which values were overwritten during the initialization phase, the host side could see nothing.

The investigation walked up to a closed door.

Jiang Lin was already very familiar with this kind of door.

In the eleventh trip to the Wasteland, when PMCU-17 returned a rejection packet for the first time, he thought he had just chosen the wrong interface.

The second time, he changed the handshake sequence.

The third time, he adjusted the response time.

The twelfth time, he discovered that a status bit would briefly change before rejection.

The forty-seventh time, that status bit disappeared.

The ninety-third time, it reappeared, but the duration was half shorter than the initial one.

On the wall of Outpost No. 1 assembly room, the recording papers went from one sheet to over a dozen.

After the ink cartridge ran out, he switched to a pencil.

After the pencil became short, he clamped the less-than-a-finger-long pencil stub into a metal sleeve to continue using it.

What PMCU-17 returned each time was very brief.

Insufficient privileges.

Request denied.

Interface closed.

Those cold status codes would not give even one more byte of answer just because he had already spent ten years in the Wasteland.

On the one hundred and seventy-first attempt, the shadow maintenance bus finally returned a state that could be parsed.

[PMCU-17]

[OUTER SERVICE MODE]

[DEGRADED]

That day, a red wind was still blowing outside the Outpost.

The status light only stayed lit for a few seconds.

Jiang Lin sat in front of the workbench, re-reading those three lines of text many times.

Every failure in the past dozen or so years required finding one's position first.

Only by re-sorting erroneous requests, response windows, permission changes, and physical states into the same ledger could the success of those few seconds have meaning.

In the end, three mutually conflicting sets of records inside PMCU-17 were distinguished.

Physical connection table.

Fault freeze table.

Available resource table exposed to the main control system.

Some channels had truly burned out.

Other channels were just removed from the available resource table by the fault ledger because the number of errors exceeded the threshold.

After maintenance privileges passed, they could still re-enter mapping in a degraded state.

The hardware had not changed.

But the hardware the system was willing to acknowledge had changed.

That forty years of work was finally compressed into two achievements.

[PMCU17_ShadowBus_Handshake_v1.0]

[MPS_FaultLedger_Reality_v0.9]

Added together, the two files occupied less than 30 MB of storage space.

Only Jiang Lin knew how many rejections, how many sheets of recording paper written full and then flipped over to the back, and how many mornings waking up to see only the same patch of red Wasteland were pressed behind these 30 MB.

They could not be directly used to crack an NVIDIA mining card.

The architecture, bus, and permission model of PMCU-17 did not belong to the 2022 GPU system either.

Yet that experience gave Jiang Lin a set of repeatedly verified dismantling methods.

Physical absence.

Manufacturing screening.

Fuse identity.

Firmware mapping.

Driver rejection.

The outside world was accustomed to using the word "crippled" to summarize the whole situation.

Engineering-wise, these five situations led to five completely different paths.

Resources that do not exist physically cannot be made up by any code.

Parts filtered out during manufacturing might be re-enabled, or they could fail completely during the first high-load test.

Fuses are usually irreversible, but they do not necessarily directly determine the final operating state.

The parts that truly possess reconstruction space are often located within the firmware-generated resource tables and the restrictions enforced by driver execution.

On the night of September 24, Jiang Lin put the 170HX logs, NVIDIA's open-sourced kernel modules from May, the GA100 public architecture data, and the shadow bus model of PMCU-17 into the same directory.

The public code could show how the host driver requested resources.

How the secure firmware generated resource tables remained hidden inside a black box.

This was already enough to confirm a direction.

The state presented externally by the 170HX was not entirely determined directly by its physical structure.

Between the chip and the host driver, there was at least an intermediate layer capable of reading device identity, organizing available resources, and then handing the results over to the driver.

This was the source of the whole matter.

Jiang Lin did not know the specific entry point.

Nor could he confirm whether all thirty-two cards possessed larger available VRAM.

A portion of those GA100s likely came from downgraded chips that had not passed complete testing. Even if a larger address space truly existed, it could harbor bad sectors, refresh failures, and high-speed operational instability.

What he grasped was the direction.

At least a portion of the limitations on this batch of cards stopped beyond the boundaries of permissions and configurations.

The door had already appeared on the map.

The keyhole was still hidden within the wall.

On September 25, a third-party testing agency randomly selected three mining cards for inspection.

The casings were dismantled.

Board versions were checked.

Power supply modules and HBM packaging appearances were recorded item by item.

The three cards respectively completed bandwidth tests and multiple cold boots.

Their behaviors were highly consistent.

On September 27, Jiang Lin paid the full batch payment.

He did not pin his hopes on any single special sample.

A single card could only give success or failure.

Thirty-two cards from the same batch could provide individual differences, control samples, and multiple destructive opportunities. Only when the sample size was sufficient would it be possible to distinguish limitations, defects, and randomness.

As for the A100 bought for 92,000 yuan, it was responsible for providing the standard answer.

At 11:42 PM.

Chen Zhi dialed into the equipment archiving meeting.

She was still in the old factory building in Jiangcheng.

Outside the glass wall behind the camera, five newly marked assembly workstations had their lights on.

Yellow tape extended along the cement floor, and temporary ID cards were neatly pasted at the front of each workstation.

[ PG - P01 ]

[ PG - P02 ]

[ PG - P03 ]

[ PG - P04 ]

[ PG - P05 ]

The five zones were currently still empty.

The tiered quotation for joint casings sent by the supplier was clipped to the clipboard beside workstation number five.

A copy of the bank receipt that arrived in the afternoon was right beside it.

Chen Zhi had checked the accounts several times.

When she spoke, her voice still carried a slight hoarseness left by continuous work.

"Director Jiang, all payment records have been verified."

She projected the capital paths onto the screen.

On the left was the first batch of orders for the underground utility tunnel.

The 2.16 million yuan product advance payment entered the Low Entropy Workshop from the project party's account, and subsequently flowed into tooling, batteries, drive components, seals, and the first batch of mission module sensors.

On the right was another completely independent capital chain.

"The A100, thirty-two 170HX cards, servers, storage, as well as this round's supporting power, cooling, testing, robot spare parts, and long-term guarantee supplies, are all paid for by your personal account."

"The advance payment for the utility tunnel project did not enter the capital chain for this batch of supplies."

"Correct."

Chen Zhi deleted the last gray auxiliary line between the two capital paths.

There were no longer any intersections on the screen.

She then opened the asset disposal proposal.

[Ownership: Jiang Lin Personal]

[Storage Location: Low Entropy Workshop Beijing R&D Center]

[Usage Mode: Gratuitous R&D Borrowing]

[Equipment Damage Risk: Borne by the Owner]

[Must Not Be Included in Utility Tunnel Project Costs]

"I suggest registering this way for now," Chen Zhi said. "If it needs to be converted into company assets later, we will conduct a separate evaluation and ownership change. After you confirm, I will archive it."

"Follow this plan."

"Alright."

She turned to the next page.

"Chen Yan's testing work hours tonight will be counted toward the company's internal cutting-edge preliminary research, not entering the utility tunnel project."

"Alright."

"What is the preliminary research project name?"

Jiang Lin's gaze fell on an email on the desk.

Sender: Professor Zhou Zhihua.

"MPS-Agent Real World Adaptation."

Chen Zhi entered the name into the project column.

[Project Name: MPS-Agent Real World Adaptation]

[Status: Hardware Feasibility Preliminary Research]

[Knowledge Scope: Jiang Lin, Liang Zhixia, Chen Yan, Chen Zhi]

[External Disclosure Prohibited]

She completed the archiving, then turned the document back to the first page and checked it from the beginning once more.

"Personal equipment and company assets have been left with separate traces. If company personnel or venues are utilized subsequently, I will continue to record costs separately."

"Alright."

Chen Zhi closed the document.

Before the camera went dark, she glanced back at the five workstations outside the glass wall.

A few hours ago, the Low Entropy Workshop received product payment for the first time by selling robots.

A few hours later, she personally cut another batch of equipment invested by Jiang Lin out of this order.

Those five robots had to be manufactured relying on the orders themselves.

Only in this way could the money they earned in the future truly support the people who manufactured them.

At 11:56 PM.

Liang Zhixia dialed in from her return vehicle.

Streetlights outside the car window flashed backward one by one. She placed her computer on her knees, and the screen would sway slightly as the vehicle passed over joints in the road.

She first opened the version directory of the underground utility tunnel project.

[G01C_PG_BatchBaseline_v1.0]

The first round of review for PG-01's on-site data had been completed.

Chassis structure.

Joint assembly.

Main power supply interface.

Thermal path.

Safety state machine framework.

Mission module mechanical and data boundaries.

The baseline versions that the first batch of five delivered machines needed to follow all entered the freezing list.

"The technical side is still waiting for your final confirmation."

Jiang Lin checked the change records page by page.

The final page had already listed all unresolved issues.

Three of them were allowed to continue being verified during the delivery stage.

The other two were moved into subsequent versions.

None of them were sufficient to prevent the baseline version from freezing.

Jiang Lin completed the electronic signature.

[Freezing Time: 23:59, September 29, 2022]

Liang Zhixia immediately modified the project status.

[First Batch Delivery Version Frozen]

"From this moment on, the business side will no longer accept customers adding functions directly to the engineering team," she said. "Requests involving mission module interfaces will be filtered by me and Xu Man first. Changes involving the chassis platform layer will then be submitted to you for review."

"Alright."

The narrow-body chassis proposed by another utility tunnel was still undergoing trafficability re-verification.

Hengtai Mine's gas detection and relay deployment module only entered mission module review.

The mountain power project had not yet obtained quotation permissions.

All three new requests were blocked outside the first batch of five products.

The 7.2 million yuan order just signed in the afternoon had already been taken over by someone to continue pushing forward.

In the past, every single change to G-01C had to go through Jiang Lin.

From the preload force of a single bolt to the rollback path of a state machine, all problems would eventually pile up on his workbench.

Tonight, the five official products still required his technical signature.

After the signature was completed, Xu Man, Chen Yan, Chen Zhi, and Liang Zhixia were already able to take over quality, testing, capital, and delivery respectively.

Those five vacant spaces had not yet grown robots.

But the Low Entropy Workshop had already begun to grow a skeleton that could continue running even without Jiang Lin.

Only then did Liang Zhixia shift her gaze to another room in the video.

Four servers occupied most of the frame.

A meal box that had completely cooled down sat on the corner of the table.

"Tomorrow afternoon at two-thirty, Nanjing University."

"I remember."

"This trip will no longer be adjusted due to business arrangements. The pick-up vehicle at Nanjing South Railway Station has been confirmed, and both the train ticket and address are in your calendar."

"Rest assured, it won't be changed."

Liang Zhixia glanced at the meal box.

"Chen Yan said that meal has already been reheated once."

Jiang Lin picked up his chopsticks and pushed aside the remaining rice.

Liang Zhixia said nothing more and closed the meeting.

At 12:17 AM.

The R&D Center fell completely quiet.

The sound of the fresh air system switching gears occasionally came from the corridor. Through the glass, four servers stood silently on the west side of the room, and the thirty-two mining cards had not yet been fully installed into the chassis.

Jiang Lin reopened Professor Zhou Zhihua's email.

The email contained only the confirmed time, location, and topics.

[September 30, 2:30 PM]

[Nanjing University School of Artificial Intelligence]

[The Common Interface of Proof Structure, Compression Theory, and Machine Learning Generalization]

This was an academic discussion.

There was no project contract.

There were no preset conclusions.

Nor did either party need to play the role of an instructor.

Professor Zhou Zhihua put forward the questions.

Jiang Lin was likewise heading to Nanjing with his own questions.

He opened a new blank document.

Giangs Brick provided a method of using local constraints to force global structure.

The PFR/Marton proof compressed massive structural problems into limited accounts while demanding that every single loss had a destination.

MPS-Agent α managed tasks, tools, evidence, permissions, and failure paths within the Wasteland Outpost.

The three lines already existed separately.

What was missing between them was an interface capable of truly operating.

At 12:31 AM, Jiang Lin extracted a section of manually trimmed device boot logs from the public test set and handed it to the newly deployed GPT-NeoX-20B.

The logs retained initialization failures, power supply states, and driver responses, while deleting the final fault conclusion.

The model quickly gave four possibilities.

Insufficient power supply.

Driver version conflict.

Poor auxiliary link contact.

A configuration switch that did not exist in this set of equipment was not turned on.

The text was fluent.

The structure was complete.

The fourth item even provided a parameter name that looked very authentic.

Jiang Lin searched within the public driver source code.

There was no corresponding field.

The model had simply pieced together several common words into an explanation that looked sufficiently like an answer.

It could propose candidate paths, and it could make those candidate paths sound convincing.

It was not responsible for proving what it had said.

Jiang Lin handed the same piece of logs to MPS-Agent α.

The screen paused for a moment and returned another set of results.

[Confirmable: Initialization failure occurred before resource mapping completed]

[Excludable: Input voltage out of bounds]

[Insufficient Evidence: Driver version conflict]

[Recommended Tool: Cold boot control / Configuration space difference comparison]

There were no fabricated fields.

No unauthorized completion.

Nor did it give a fifth possibility that Jiang Lin had not yet written into the rule base.

MPS-Agent α guarded the evidence boundary, yet could only advance along already delineated paths.

Jiang Lin placed the two results side by side on the screen.

The left side could see many roads, yet would paint a cliff as a bridge.

The right side could check every single foothold, yet found it difficult to actively discover entry points outside the map.

What he needed to do was connect the two capabilities together.

Candidate paths were proposed by the model.

Facts were handed to tools for verification.

Failures entered the ledger.

Permissions were controlled by the state machine.

Every final result had to be traceable back to the original evidence.

The model could make mistakes.

Errors could not go missing within the system.

If this path held true, what would be obtained would transcend a model that only knew how to generate text.

It would receive tasks.

Select tools.

Read results.

Roll back to checkpoints after discovering path failures.

Re-propose candidates.

Until delivering a traceable answer, or honestly acknowledging that existing evidence could not complete the task.

This matter required computing power.

A single A100 40GB was enough to complete benchmark tests and small-scale adaptation.

To want to continue moving forward, it was still far too little.

If the thirty-two 170HX cards could only maintain their current state, they would simply be thirty-two mining cards with high-speed VRAM bandwidth.

Only if Jiang Lin's judgment could pass verification would the situation change.

He printed out the core question from Professor Zhou Zhihua's email.

And added a line of text below it.

[After compression, what cannot be lost?]

He looked at it for a moment, then clipped the paper under the securing strap of the A100 shipping box.

At 1:43 AM.

Four groups of storage completed their final hash verification on the offline verification device.

The green status lights lit up one by one.

The first group stored publicly available models, training frameworks, toolchains, and corpora from 2022.

GPT-NeoX-20B.

CodeGen-16B.

PyTorch and CUDA-related source code.

Public mathematics, code, and machine learning data.

The second group stored Jiang Lin's own achievements.

Giangs Brick formalized structure.

PFR/Marton controlled research copies.

MPS-Kernel.

MPS-Agent α.

Proof dependency graphs and failed node ledgers.

The third group was hardware analysis data.

A100 benchmark environment.

170HX raw device logs.

Configuration space dumps.

Driver initialization records.

GA100 public architecture data.

The fourth group stored the tool interfaces left behind by the eleventh Wasteland trip.

[HeatRouter_Node_Prototype_v1.0]

[PMCU17_ShadowBus_Handshake_v1.0]

[OuterRing_FaultLog_Decoder_v1.2]

[MPS_FaultLedger_Reality_v0.9]

[TM7_InnerRing_Access_Prerequisites_v0.1]

The original routes, equipment images, and operational logs of the underground utility tunnel project did not enter any storage group.

Those materials belong to the project party's data domain.

The general thermal management conclusions for PG-01 have been abstracted.

When the client handed the real scenario over to the Low Entropy Workshop for verification, it did not mean handing the scenario itself over for Jiang Lin to use freely.

Once the boundary of permissions is crossed once for convenience, all subsequent reviews will lose their meaning.

Preparations for the twelfth trip to the Wasteland had long been underway in the background.

On September 17th, Jiang Lin inquired three channels about A100 spot goods.

On September 19th, an A100 from existing project inventory completed the verification of its source, serial number, and cargo rights.

On September 21st, he discovered abnormal specifications in the 170HX disposal list.

On September 25th, the third-party random inspection was completed.

On September 27th, thirty-two mining cards were purchased in a single batch.

Servers, storage, energy expansion, heat dissipation, electronic testing, Outpost maintenance, and long-term security supplies arrived successively, interspersed between the gaps of the pipe gallery project.

The robot line had occupied most of the past dozen days.

Transmission preparations never stopped.

At 1:58 AM.

Jiang Lin opened the independent warehouse on the north side.

The freight door slowly rose.

The mixed smell of wooden crates, rubber, grease, and new cables rushed out from the warehouse.

The thirty-two mining cards and four servers accounted for only a small portion of the entire set of supplies.

Near the freight door, twenty-four 550-watt photovoltaic modules were vertically fixed in the transport rack.

Two pallets beside them respectively held lithium iron phosphate energy storage modules, inverters, DC control cabinets, contactors, fuses, and coiled cables.

[New Photovoltaic Rated Power: 13.2 kW]

[New Energy Storage Capacity: 80kWh]

[Emergency Generator: 18kW]

The fuel matching the emergency generator only undertook black starts, equipment calibration, and fault recovery.

It could not support the continuous operation of computing power nodes.

The second area stored the heat dissipation system.

The plate heat exchanger was fixed in the center by a wooden frame.

Three backup circulation pumps were packaged separately.

Twelve industrial fans were arranged by number.

Heat dissipation rows, filter screens, pressure-resistant hoses, copper plates, aluminum plates, heat pipes, graphite films, and ceramic insulation sheets were divided into different material groups.

These things looked ordinary.

Any single one of them, taken out alone, could not be called advanced.

The HeatRouter_Node_Prototype formed during the eleventh trip to the Wasteland had already prescribed new combination methods for them.

The materials and microchannels of the outer ring in the future could not be brought back to reality.

When heat should leave which node and where it should be sent, this set of principles had remained in Jiang Lin's memory and records.

The third area was like an electronic laboratory taken apart and put into boxes.

Oscilloscope.

Logic analyzer.

SPI and JTAG programmers.

FPGA development board.

Programmable power supply.

Microscopes, preheating platforms, and board-level rework equipment.

Beside them were also flash memory, power supply modules, connectors, wires, soldering consumables, and board samples allowed to be damaged.

Jiang Lin could not temporarily determine which layer the restriction of the 170HX was located on.

The more paths that needed verification, the less the failures that could be borne in the Wasteland could rely solely on four mining cards.

Further inside, the distance between supplies and computing power grew further and further apart.

The spare joints, drive boards, foot-end sensors, and batteries of G-Explorer were packed into four black turnover boxes.

Six communication relay nodes respectively completed charge and discharge tests.

Twelve disposable environmental recording boxes had been written with independent numbers.

Water pumps, filter elements, water purification membranes, fan bearings, belts, seals, and DC bus spare parts occupied another row of shelves.

Jiang Lin had seen how a water pump worth less than two hundred yuan in the Wasteland could cause an entire farmland to lose irrigation during the dry season.

He had also seen how a bearing without spare parts could make a wind turbine stall for seven months.

Things that could be bought at any time in the Real World might turn into years of waiting if even one piece was missing in the Wasteland.

At the innermost part of the warehouse were copper-aluminum profiles, engineering plastics, cutting tools, grease, fasteners, and two small additive manufacturing equipment.

The last row of turnover boxes stored seeds, fertilizers, medicines, vitamins, edible oil, salt, protective suits, and respiratory filters.

The seeds were divided into three portions.

Different batches.

Different sealed bags.

Placed in three locations respectively.

The Outpost was already able to maintain basic living conditions.

Decades of time were still enough to wear out water pumps, exhaust filter elements, make metals lose lubrication, and make a crop disappear from the seed bank due to a single disease.

Jiang Lin walked past rows of supplies.

When entering the Wasteland for the first time, he brought a schoolbag.

Inside were water, compressed food, pens, notebooks, and a few sets of test papers.

The second time, he brought an extra tent and a Geiger counter.

Later, the schoolbag turned into a wooden crate.

The wooden crate turned into a carrier frame.

The carrier frame turned into the small industrial system in front of him that had been split, numbered, and packaged.

The change did not happen on a certain suddenly arriving night.

It was hidden after every water shortage, power outage, tool wear, and equipment scrap, and was brought to today little by little by him.

All supplies were attached with personal asset tags.

Not a single one of them came from the first batch of delivery inventory of the pipe gallery project, nor did they use the 2.16 million yuan product advance payment that had just arrived.

Those five workstations in Jiangcheng were waiting for the client's robots.

What was prepared here was another set of systems that might consume decades in one minute of the Real World.

At 2:28 AM.

Jiang Lin returned to the testing room.

The four servers began to light up at low power.

The first one started up.

All eight cards appeared.

After the second one started up, there were only seven cards in the device list.

The sixth slot was empty.

Jiang Lin turned off the power, waited for the indicator light to completely go out, and re-tightened the auxiliary power detection line.

Powered on again.

The eighth card appeared.

When the third server started up, the high-speed fan suddenly pulled to the maximum speed.

The sharp wind instantly filled the room, and the printing paper on the desk was lifted up by a corner by the airflow.

[Fan Feedback Abnormality]

Jiang Lin followed the harness to find the feedback interface.

The plug had entered the buckle, but the terminal was not fully in place.

He replaced the feedback line.

The alarm disappeared.

The fourth one started up.

Card No. 29 failed initialization again.

The same position.

The same manifestation.

Jiang Lin looked at it for a few seconds, dismantled it, and put it into the allowable failure group.

After the servers were shut down one by one, the room temperature was already a few degrees higher than an hour ago.

The metal chassis was still radiating heat outward, and the fan blades rotated slowly under inertia.

At 3:09 AM.

The power budget of the entire equipment set was completed.

A red number appeared in the center of the screen.

[Estimated Simultaneous Full-Load Input Power: 10.8 kW]

The newly added photovoltaic, energy storage, and emergency power generation equipment in this round were still sealed in the transport boxes.

Even if the installation was completely finished, the rated photovoltaic power of 13.2 kW did not equal the all-day available power.

The dust of the Wasteland would cover the photovoltaic surface.

Winter sunshine hours shortened.

Consecutive cloudy days would cause power generation to drop to a small fraction of the rated value.

Deducting the safety margin and conversion loss, 80 kWh of energy storage was only enough for four servers to run at full load for a few hours.

Before the new power supply circuit completed installation and long-term verification, the power margin that the Outpost could stably call upon was still just over six kilowatts.

Even if some maintenance equipment was temporarily turned off, it would not allow the four servers to run simultaneously.

Electricity was only the first layer of limitation.

The existing air ducts likewise could not carry away continuous heat at the level of ten kilowatts.

If the computing power node operated continuously in a sealed, dust-accumulating, and low-maintenance environment, the first to fail might not be the GPU, but could also be a fan, a pump head, or a section of cooling fins blocked by dust.

Jiang Lin took out four red labels and stuck them on the server power switches respectively.

[Simultaneous Full-Load Prohibited]

He still kept all thirty-two cards in the transmission list.

The Outpost lacked sufficient instantaneous power.

The Wasteland World possessed time.

They could be tested card by card.

Grouped startup.

Rotated operation.

First obtain a stable node, then expand to the second one.

Only after power supply, heat dissipation, storage, and fault rollback were all closed was it allowed to build a complete computing cluster.

The heat flow routing prototype completed during the eleventh trip to the Wasteland also had a new task.

Previously, it sent the heat near the PG-01 drive module to the casing.

This time, it had to face four servers and a peak load exceeding ten kilowatts.

Jiang Lin opened the twelfth transmission task list.

The seventeen tasks originally listed were compressed into six.

[Restore and Expand Outpost Power Supply, Ventilation, and Storage Environment]

[Establish A100 Benchmark Node]

[Confirm the Layer Where 170HX Limitations Reside]

[Obtain Long-Term Operable Computing Nodes]

[Advance MPS-Agent α Real World Adaptation]

[Continue TM-7 Outer Ring Read-Only Parsing and Inner Ring Access Preliminary Verification]

Six tasks were printed out.

Large blank spaces were left under each item.

How many years, how many failures, and how many new recording papers those blanks would be filled with, Jiang Lin could not know now.

At 4:26 AM.

Loading began.

Jiang Lin used an electric pallet truck to move the power and cooling pallets into the transmission area one by one.

Four servers.

Two groups of storage.

A100 benchmark node.

Electronic test box.

Robot spare parts.

Outpost maintenance supplies.

Living support box.

All equipment entered the six-meter by eight-meter safe projection range reserved before leaving the Wasteland last time.

The reversing beep of the pallet truck sounded again and again.

Metal wheels rolled over the floor joints, emitting a dull vibration.

Jiang Lin adjusted the position alone.

Approach.

Stop.

Measure the distance.

Move again.

The narrowest passage between the carrier frames had to allow him to pass sideways.

No box could crush the Outpost's battery cabinet, workbench, or escape path after transmission.

At 5:03 AM, the last living support box entered position.

Jiang Lin connected the carrier frames and pallets group by group according to their numbers.

The main connection belt started from the outermost pallet, passed through the rack base, power pallet, cooling pallet, and turnover box fixing rings in turn, and finally connected to the carrying belt around his waist.

Each fixing strap underwent secondary tightening.

All equipment with batteries cut off output.

Fuel containers completed sealing and leakage checks.

Cutting tools, metal bars, and rework equipment were all equipped with independent constraints.

The A100 transport box was pasted with an eye-catching white label.

[REFERENCE]

[Disassembly Prohibited]

Among the thirty-two 170HX cards, twenty-eight were computing candidates.

Four were allowed to be dismantled, soldered, rewritten, and failed.

The answer did not fall directly into Jiang Lin's hands from the future.

Initially, there was only a mine disposal list, an uncoordinated bus record, and the dozen years he spent in front of PMCU-17.

These pieces of evidence could not guarantee success.

But they were enough to support one investment.

At 5:29 AM.

Jiang Lin turned off the main lighting of the room.

The warehouse fell into dimness.

The status lights on the four racks and each group of carrying pallets lit up in turn, red, green, and orange colors scattered in the darkness, like a small city that had not yet been officially powered on.

Another backpack was placed on the chair outside the door.

Clean shirt.

Charger.

Identity documents.

Train ticket to Nanjing.

Those things did not enter the transmission range.

The Real World would continue a minute later.

At 2:30 PM, there was an agreed-upon academic discussion at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University.

Corridor access control entered an exclusive state according to preset rules.

[5:30 AM to 6:30 AM]

[Equipment Handling and High-Voltage Power-On Testing]

[Unauthorized Entry Prohibited]

At 5:30 AM.

The countdown jumped to [00:30:00].

Jiang Lin walked through the transmission area for the last time.

On one side was an A100 worth 92,000 yuan.

On the other side were thirty-two 170HX cards processed in batches after the mining boom receded.

The question raised by Professor Zhou Zhihua was sandwiched under the fixing strap of the A100 transport box.

That A100 would tell Jiang Lin what results a complete GA100 computing platform should present.

While the thirty-two mining cards retained the cropped answers.

The countdown continued to shorten.

Fifteen minutes.

Five minutes.

One minute.

The world outside the room was awakening.

The cleaning staff's cart passed by from the other end of the corridor.

The first batch of early shift vehicles began to appear on the distant road.

The last message in the delivery group came from Xu Man.

[Tomorrow morning at 8:30, the first batch delivery production preparation meeting.]

Jiang Lin glanced at it, turned off his phone, and placed it beside the backpack outside the transmission range.

He grasped the main connection belt.

[00:00:00:08]

Equipment wear and tear that the Real World could not afford could happen on the other side.

Technical paths that the Real World did not have time to finish walking could be eliminated item by item over decades.

[00:00:00:01]

A standard answer sheet was already placed in front of him.

What Jiang Lin was looking for was from which layer the two answers began to diverge.