The problem is simple: consumer motherboards don’t have that many PCIe slots, and consumer CPUs don’t have enough lanes to run 3+ GPUs at full PCIe gen 3 or gen 4 speeds.

My idea was to buy 3-4 computers for cheap, slot a GPU into each of them and use 4 of them in tandem. I imagine this will require some sort of agent running on each node which will be connected through a 10Gbe network. I can get a 10Gbe network running for this project.

Does Ollama or any other local AI project support this? Getting a server motherboard with CPU is going to get expensive very quickly, but this would be a great alternative.

Thanks

  • reptar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Hey I built a micro -atx epyc for work that has tons of pcie slots. Pretty sure it was an ASRock (or ASRack). I can find the details tomorrow if you’d like. Just let me know!

    E: well, it looks like I remembered wrong and it was an atx, not micro. I think it is ASRock Rack ROMED8-2T and it has 7 PCIe4.0 x16 (I needed a lot). Unfortunately I don’t think it’s sold anymore other than really high prices on eBay.

    • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Thank you, and that highlights the problem - I don’t see any affordable options (around $200 or so for a motherboard + CPU combo) for a lot of PCIe lanes other than purchasing Frankenstein boards from Aliexpress. Which isn’t going to be a thing for much longer with tariffs, so I’m looking elsewhere