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

  • Xanza@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    I’m not going to do anything enterprise.

    You are, though. You’re creating a GPU cluster for generative AI which is an enterprise endeavor…

    • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      3 days ago

      Specifically because PCIe slots go for a premium on motherboards and CPU architectures. If I didn’t have to worry about PCIe I wouldn’t care about a networked AI cluster. But yes, I accept what you say