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"I started experimenting with Nvidia's RTX 4090s. I bought a bunch of them and put them into a mining rack and just ran some tests. I quickly figured out that is not the way to go,"

Well, I hope they were at least smart enough to use PCEI4 x16...otherwise that will never, ever work well. 2x 4090 saturate my PCEI4 x16 bus during training workloads. If they were PCEI3 x1 risers... That's 32x lower inter-gpu bandwidth!

Also, for 50K per GPU, and all this hacking, buy an older 8x A100 system with water-cooling or something.

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Really depends on the model and the software tricks you're using. With DDP and gradient accumulation, you can reduce the bandwidth bottleneck by quite a bit. We've trained with 4090s running at x4 lanes with very small impact. And running at x4 means you can stuff up to 26-28GPUs on a single cpu node (say epyc) and get PCIe latency and get rid of networking hassle.

Do you have any pictures and/or documentation of that setup, power draw and performance? It sounds pretty interesting!

Never got around to writing some public docs. It's essentially bunch of GPUs on custom aluminum extrusion frames sitting in a server rack, connected to romed8-2t motherboard through pcie splitters.

Power limited to 240w, negligible performance loss while halving energy usage, uses 3 20a circuits.

Performance can range anywhere from 2x4090=1xa100 to 4x4090=1xa100 depending on models, etc.

It's great value for the money, and very easy to resell as well.

Very nice!

240W?

3 x 20A = 6600W?

240W per card probably

Indeed.

I meant each card is limited to 240w, instead of the usual 450w. Also, it's more like 4 circuits after all, because the main cpu/mb/2gpus are on a 15a too.

Ah! Ok, thank you now I get it. That's a very nice rig you have there. So at a guess you didn't care as much about the peak computing capacity as long as whatever you are doing all fits in GPU memory and this is your way of collecting that much memory in a single machine so you still have reasonable interconnect speeds between GPUs?

Yeah, it's really just trying to get as much compute as possible as cheaply as possible interconnected in a reasonably fast way with low latency. Slow networking would be a bottleneck and expensive high end networking would defeat the purpose of staying cheap.

Very smart approach. I may copy your setup for some project that I've been working on for years but that stalled waiting for more memory in GPUs.

You’d be surprised at how cheap high end networking that outperforms PCIE4 x4 is - 100Gb omni-path nics are running for 20$ on ebay! And those will saturate PCIE3 x16.

Though of course with multiple boards/ram/cpu it gets complicated again.

Which cards? Been looking at nics but couldn't find cheap ones past 25-40Gb

Omni-path is/was the Intel fork of Infiniband, which from rough memory they bought from QLogic some years ago.

* Switch: https://www.ebay.com/itm/273064154224

* Adapters: https://www.ebay.com/itm/296188773061 / https://www.ebay.com/itm/166199451199

* Cables: No idea, sorry. ;)

* Description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOIXtsjJMYE

Note that I don't know those Ebay sellers at all, they're just some of the cheaper results showing up from searching. There seem to be plenty of other results too. :)

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Possibly useful, though it's Proxmox focused:

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/proxmox-with-intel-omni-path...

Interesting, I would expect the impact to be noticeable at 4x! and yeah it heavily depends on model, sharding method, model vs data parallel. I’m hitting the peak bandwidth due to a very wide, shallow model that is split between each GPU model parallel and with CPU optimizer offload - so worst case scenario there.

But it does kind of validate Nvidia’s choice to remove nvlink. How useful would it really be if x4 PCIE gets reasonably decent perf? Unless your inner dim is massive or something you should be fine.

Wouldn't an EPYC based motherboard (lots of PCIe x16 slots) generally be the right choice for testing multiple 4090's, rather than a mining rack?

A mining rack would mean the metal frame where the 4090's are mounted, not the motherboard. Since they pulled off this build, We will assume they are smart to use a server motherboard with enough PCIe slots and lanes.

Ahhh. I was thinking they might also have been meaning one of the mining specific motherboards, which commonly use a bunch of PCIe x16 physical slots with only PCIe x1 electrical connections.

This kind of thing:

https://www.asrock.com/mb/amd/x370%20pro%20btc+

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