Esmeralda Cloud was a fully off-grid datacenter fully powered with Starlink, 12 solar panels, and the beautiful backdrop of a flower farm and vineyard.
Team: Nick Foley, Ben James, Guthrie Gintzler, Bjorn Heinbokel, Luke Murry, Andy Rapista, Ami Zou, and myself! (Full list of support + sponsors on the Github because as it turns out, it requires a lot of love and help to set all this up in a week)
If you’d like to see screenshots of the website before we took down the server, I’ve attached a small grid of snaps in the Github!
On the physical side, I was of no use in terms of procuring materials or designing efficient/smart wiring, but I was able to help provide raw manpower in terms of helping setup solar panels which was cool!
Luckily I was of more help on the software side where I setup the server, figured out how to turn our PC in the middle of nowhere into a server, and setup a Jupyter notebook server where people could use our fully green server to run code & experiments with our GPU. Random aside, we were also able to work out the power draw of the PC/GPU versus the expected power we’d get from the solar panels to dynamically adjust the power draw overnight to ensure our solar powered server had 100% even throughout the night. Maybe the coolest thing that happened on our server besides serving LLMs and multiplying lots of matrices at blazing speeds was having other members of the team host a session teaching kids to code where they were able to remotely connect to our server and use our resources.
I’m still in awe as to how we managed to get all the materials, design the entire thing, and get it up and running in under 2 weeks. Highly recommend working on fun projects with an amazing team fueled purely by Barebells and vibes :)