By Sandra Quinn
When this writer first heard she was about to see ‘the rig’ in the Horizon Globex offices in the University of Limerick, she imagined a picture of something like an oil rig. She had images in her head of something big, awkward, impressive and imposing.
She was not expecting what she saw – something which could fit into the boot of her car or a very large box.
The phrase ‘small, but mighty’ or ‘good things come in small packages’ came to mind – phrases she has heard a lot of as she is a paltry height of just 4 foot 10.
The rig itself was built by the talented people in the Horizon Globex team and in a nutshell, it features six high performance Graphic Processing Units (GPU’s), which are designed at their core to do a lot of parallel computing.
This means that it can out perform a Central Processing Unit (CPU) in certain tasks, which makes it perfectly suited to cryptocurrency mining.
In order to bring power to the six GPU’s, Horizon Globex use a high power, high efficiency Power Supply Unit (PSU) – this is the big black box that you can see at the bottom of the rig in the picture.
Despite all of the work it is doing, the rig is actually very quiet and runs away in the background, beavering away at its mammoth task in record time, while naturally being a local source of heat.
In the future, in order to maintain the rig, it will be moved to a renewable energy supply. This will help to achieve the core goal of the rig project, which is to reduce the impact that the cryptocurrency mining has on the environment.
In terms of innovation and exciting projects, Horizon Globex is really at the centre of bringing some exciting new tech projects to the fore, so watch this space.
