3 ms·
Has anyone here ever built an Open Compute box, or is it only the kind of thing that makes sense by the rackful? I guess there is nowhere to buy 1 or 2 cases?
by chubot 11y ago
Has anyone here ever built an Open Compute box, or is it only the kind of thing that makes sense by the rackful? I guess there is nowhere to buy 1 or 2 cases?
I would like a high end server box at home, with GPUs, and it would be nice to have a configuration known to work, down to the Linux distro and drivers. Though I'm guessing they are louder than I would want, because they don't care about noise as much with server hardware.
- jonnycowboy 11y agoIn this case the price is prohibitive. That server has 8 Nvidia K40's, each between 1500-2000$. So you're looking at a 15-20k$ server!
- smhx 11y agoNVIDIA M40s, which are the new cards, so double that estimate.
- chubot 11y agoWell I was asking about OpenCompute in general, not just the new GPU box. And in theory, the price per FLOP should be better than almost anything out there... if I actually needed those FLOPs it would be cost effective :)
- ansible 11y agoI would like a high end server box at home, with GPUs, and it would be nice to have a configuration known to work, down to the Linux distro and drivers. Though I'm guessing they are louder than I would want, because they don't care about noise as much with server hardware. You can buy high-end server boxes right now, with a similar configuration. The FB designed hardware may be a little more energy efficient, easier to service, and it fits into their infrastructure better. But it isn't fundamentally different than a server you can buy from, say, SuperMicro. You can buy and put together that kind of thing yourself, or you can get an integrator to do it for you, and have them do the initial testing and burn-in to ensure there won't be problems.
- chubot 11y agoBut at what price? I was hoping to get something close to the cost of the parts. From the research I've done, you end up paying a big premium for server hardware, and especially so if you have someone do the OS installation for you. SuperMicro looks like it provides every configuration under the sun, which drives the price way up. The appeal of OpenCompute is that if you know they're running 10,000 copies of this exact configuration, the kinks are likely to be worked out. It isn't trivial to do this work yourself, even though I've built normal PCs before. Good blog post on building your own: https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2012/05/a_cloud_of_my_own/