For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:
- a few gaming VMs
- a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
- an LLM server
- a Stable Diffusion server
- media server
Just to name a few possibilities…
Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.
So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?
Fiber isn’t some exotic never seen technology, its everywhere nowadays.
Moonlight literally does what you want, today! using hvec encoding straight in the gpu.
Try it out on your own network now.
A display port to fiber extender is $2,000. The fiber is not for the network.
Moonlight does not do what I want, moonlight requires a GPU on the thin client to decode. You would need a high end GPU to decide multiple high resolution video streams. Also afaik, moonlight doesn’t support multiple displays.
Fair enough. If you know it doesn’t work for your use case that’s fine.
As demonstrated elsewhere in this discussion, GPU HEVC encoding only requires 10ms of extra latency, then it can transit over fiber optic networking at very low latency.
Many GPUs have HEVC decoders on board., including cell phones. Most newer Intel and AMD CPUs actually have an HEVC decoder pipeline as well.
I don’t think anybody’s saying a self-hosted GPU VM is for everybody, but it does make sense for a lot of use cases. And that’s where I think our schism is coming from.
As far as the $2,000 transducer to fiber… it’s doing the same exact thing, just more specialized equipment maybe a little bit lower latency.