Rack mount machine for Titan V cards

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Jason Tibbitts

New Member
Feb 13, 2019
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I currently have two Titan V cards and I need to build a machine to house them. (I would like it to house four cards but that seems even more difficult.) The machine needs to be rack mountable and have remote management, but a single CPU socket is fine and I only really need 128GB of memory. I generally use Supermicro equipment but am willing to try anything as long as it works. I am also trying not to spend a fortune on this. (The cards were a donation.)

I've built tens of servers and hundreds of desktops but trying to do proper rackmount stuff with redundant power supplies using consumer video cards is a bit out of my experience.

Supermicro doesn't really offer any "premade" systems for this; they do have a system which they say supports two GV100 cards, which I guess are reasonable close to Titan V cards, but nothing that's single socket and nothing that would conceivably support four cards. They have a 4U chassis which looks like it would work (the CSE-747BTQ-R1K62B) but don't provide any detailed documentation which would show the power supply cabling, so I can't tell how I would connect the cards.

The board I'm looking at is the X11SPL-F. I would prefer the X11SPH-NCTPF (because that better fits my networking needs) but the slots on that one are more limited. I know that PCIe lanes will in short supply with a single socket but that's OK. It seems Supermicro doesn't use open-ended slots so I guess only the x16 slots would work at all. (So much for four cards on one board. I guess you have to go dual socket for that, which bumps up the cost quite a bit.)

I would really appreciate any suggestions. I feel like this should be easy but I've messed this up once already (assuming the Titan V cards would fit into a dedicated GPU machine when that's clearly not possible) and I'd rather not repeat that.