Intel VCA Card

[rockitlikeithott]

8ANET - Intel® Visual Compute Accelerator VCA PCIe 3.0 VCA1283LVV

I'm not sure if anyone here would have any use for these but they're currently 40% off at the above link.

 

[MiniKnight]

I think if you buy a system with them you end up getting them for about the same or less.

 

[Hank C]

how does it actually work?

 

[Deslok]

ok now that i looked up it's 3 broadwell cpu's with memory... how do you use them for non video things

 

[Chuntzu]

This is cool

 

[Patriot]

Intel® Visual Compute Accelerator Product Brief
Interesting

 

[Patrick]

From what I have heard these cards are extremely popular with folks looking to do things like broadcast encoding. I tried to get one and was met with a smile similar to trying to get a KNL platform.

BUT for the STH April 2, 2016 meetup we will have at least one KNL platform, trying to get two.

 

[mtekk]

ok now that i looked up it's 3 broadwell cpu's with memory... how do you use them for non video things

After digging through the software user guide, it appears that they have a utility for booting images (a CentOS image is provided, but you can make your own) on all three nodes on the card (stored in a read only ramdisk). From there you can ssh in and do whatever you want (it appears, as long as you are ok with all of your storage being across NFS). The gotcha is it looks like they want you to run a modified version of CentOS 7.1 on the host system (but I'm sure there are ways around that). Also, it looks like these require ECC DDR3 SODIMMS.

 

[badskater]

It would be a great product, if there was a way to make it run windows for me. I would use these as test workstation for some professional encoding tools that i have access to, and they run windows only. (If we could also get like an Nvidia GRID to be shared between the systems on that card, it may be even better )

 

[Scott Laird]

How does networking work with these? It could get you an entertaining Kubernetes-on-CoreOS cluster in a tiny footprint.