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

  • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    21·
    3 days ago

    Used 3090s go for $800. I was planning to wait for the ARC B580s to go down in price to buy a few. The reason for the networked setup is because I didn’t find there to be enough PCIe lanes in any of the used computers I was looking at. If there’s either an affordable card with good performance and 48GB of VRAM, or there’s an affordable motherboard + CPU combo with a lot of PCIe lanes under $200, then I’ll gladly drop the idea of the distributed AI. I just need lots of VRAM and this is the only way I could think of.

    Thanks

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      PLEASE look back at the crypto mining rush of a decade ago. I implore you.

      You’re buying into something that doesn’t exist.