
Facebook Open Sources Its AI Hardware as It Races Google - dsr12
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/facebook-open-source-ai-big-sur/
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magicalist
ugh, Wired is the worst. Here's an actual blogpost from engineers on the
project: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/1687861518126048/facebook-
to...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/1687861518126048/facebook-to-open-
source-ai-hardware-design/)

It seems the main thing here is 8 GPUs in a box that doesn't need "special
cooling and other unique infrastructure to operate", it can just go into
existing racks. The "flexibility to configure between multiple PCI-e
topologies" sounds interesting, but there's no more information on that.

edit: oh, already been submitted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10712038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10712038)

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chubot
Has anyone here ever built an Open Compute box, or is it only the kind of
thing that makes sense by the rackful? I guess there is nowhere to buy 1 or 2
cases?

I would like a high end server box at home, with GPUs, and it would be nice to
have a configuration known to work, down to the Linux distro and drivers.
Though I'm guessing they are louder than I would want, because they don't care
about noise as much with server hardware.

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jonnycowboy
In this case the price is prohibitive. That server has 8 Nvidia K40's, each
between 1500-2000$. So you're looking at a 15-20k$ server!

~~~
chubot
Well I was asking about OpenCompute in general, not just the new GPU box.

And in theory, the price per FLOP should be better than almost anything out
there... if I actually needed those FLOPs it would be cost effective :)

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namelezz
And how much does one need to spend on implementing the design? For software
one can clone, build, and start playing with the APIs. The cost is almost 0.

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meeper16
Facebook and some others started out one upping myspace (myspace one upped
friendster) and was a weak technology company. Text entry boxes and messaging
do not make you a strong technology company especially when you're copying
frameworks. Google's started in AI and as a strong algorithmically based
technology company and has continued.

Facebook has a long way to go along with many other companies.

