GPU mining rigs as media servers

vvvv beta general
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Any reason something like this wouldn’t make a good media server?

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Manufacturer-AMD-Nvidia-Rig-Mining-graphics_60720745424.html?spm=a2700.10389535.c0001.7.107c5081j47CBe

image.png1000×1000 769 KB

I presume CPU bandwidth is the first issue, and multi-GPU management nightmares is the next.

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I guess it will depend on what kind of media you will be serving

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and you can have even more GPUs with this board: http://edgeup.asus.com/2017/b250-mining-expert-motherboard-19-pcie-blockchain-beast/

2 Likes
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These mining boards interface just x1 PCIe so the data bandwith is pretty limited.

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Not sure what can be done on 1 pcie 1x slot,
maybe a video playback works fine

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Actually video playback perhaps isn’t a great example :)

Places where you need PCIe bandwidth:

  1. Video playback (unless you can store entire video sequence on GPU which is pretty rare although theoretically possible if you had a CUDA h264 decompressor. With HAP you’d run out of GPU memory too quickly)
  2. Loading / reloading images (e.g. FileTexture)
  3. Copying between GPU’s (e.g. if you have a single renderer window which spans monitors attached to different GPU’s)
  4. You’re doing a lot of reading back from GPU (e.g. Pipet, Writer)

Notes:

  • (3) should be definitely avoided, and also applies when any window is visible on a monitor other than the one it is being rendered on
  • If you’re just pipeting a few values (e.g. <1kB per frame) then PCIe bandwidth probably isn’t your bottleneck
  • In general, VVVV is assigned to one GPU (google the forums for startup flags to assign dx11 a specific GPU). In this case, if you use just one vvvv.exe process, then all your other GPU’s are generally just (relatively slow) output splitters.
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@sunep - nice, that’s pretty cheap too!

Still the question stands…
Would any of this be any use for a graphics server?
My instinct is that the software just isn’t there (in VVVV land) to cope with many-GPU. But if it was, then you could do a hell of a lot as long as you didn’t require many inter-GPU copies

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I don’t think the celeron cpu – whatever it is exactly – will be able to satisfy all those GPUs. As far as I know most if not all celerons only have 2 Cores. But maybe you can swap it for something more powerful. Also 4 GB of Ram are most likely insufficient and there seems to be only one slot on the motherboard.

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you could put a more beefy CPU in the machine, so that is less of a bottleneck

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