In the conclusion of my previous homelab post, I pled to the eBay gods begging for a 4xP100 system. My prayers were heard, possibly by a malevolent spirit as a V100 16GB for $400 surfaced. More money than I’d be willing to spend on a P100 but the cheapest I’d ever seen a V100, I fell to temptation. To use all four cards, I needed something bigger than the Rosewill RSV-R4100U. Enter the OpenBenchTable, and some 3d printed parts I designed to be able to securely mount four compute GPUs:
The “forthcoming” project mentioned throughout this post has been released! Check it out here.
Here’s a (long winded) video overview of this project:
Background
Rendered desperate for VRAM by a forthcoming stylegan-related project, I recently had to wade thermistor first into the concernedly hot and strange world of GPUs without video outputs to design a high performance cooler for the NVIDIA Tesla K80.
Too esoteric to game on, and too power hungry to mine cryptocurrencies with, the K80 (allegedly the ‘The World’s Most Popular GPU’) can be had for under $250 USD on ebay, a far cry from it’s imperial MSRP of $5000. By my math, the card is one of the most cost-efficient ways to avail one’s self of video ram by the dozen of gigabytes.
This sounds great on paper, but actually getting one of these configured to do useful work is a kind of a project in, and of itself. I’ll eventually get to this in the aforementioned upcoming post. Today’s topic however, is upstream of all that: the task of keeping these things cool.
