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

  • @litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0•6 days ago

    Prior-gen Epyc boards show up on eBay from time to time, often as CPU+mobo bundles from Chinese datacenters that are upgrading to latest gen. These can be had for a deal, if they’re still available, and would provide PCIe lanes for days.

    • BombOmOmEnglish
      0•6 days ago

      Yeah, adding to your post, Threadripper also has lots of PCIe lanes. Here is one that has 4 x16 slots. And, note, I am not endorsing that specific listing. I did very minimal research on that listing, just using it as an example.

      Edit: Marauding_gibberish, if you need/want AM5: x670E motherboards have a good number of PCIe lanes and can be bought used now (x870E are newest gen AM5 with lots of lanes as well, but both pale compared to what you can get with Epyc or Threadripper).