Re:Tinygrad: Hacked 4090 driver to enable P2P
by pests on Friday April 12, 2024 @08:17PM
(#40019042)
I really like the information about how the cloud providers do their multiplexing, thanks. There was some tech posted here a few month ago that was similar I found very interesting - plug all devices, ram, hard drives, and CPUS into a larger fabric and a way to spin up "servers" of any size from the pool of resources... wish I could remember the name now.
nit: HN formatting messed up your math in the second sentence, I believe you italicized on accident using * for equations.
They're the stuff that enables cloud operators to pool like 30 GPUs across like 10 CPU sockets while letting you virtually hot-plug them to fit demand. Or when you want to make a SAN with real NVMe-over-PCIe. Far cheaper than normal networking switches with similar ports (assuming hosts doing just x4 bifurcation, it's very comparable to a 50G Ethernet port. The above chip thus matches a 24 port 50G Ethernet switch. Trading reach for only needing retimers, not full NICs, in each connected host. Easily better for HPC clusters up to about 200 kW made from dense compute nodes.), but sadly still lacking affordable COTS parts that don't require soldering or contacting sales for pricing (the only COTS with list prices seem to be Broadcom's reference designs, for prices befitting an evaluation kit, not a Beowulf cluster).