Building 4x GTX 1080 server

[pr0n]

Hello, 

company where I works is going to build new cracking rig. It would be very helpfull if you could provide me opinion on our setup.

Goal:

- 1-4U chassis
- 4x GTX 1080 FE
- high efficiency PSU
- optimal cooling

Setup:

Barebone: Supermicro SuperServer 1029GQ-TRT - 1U GPU Server - 2x SATA - 2000W Redundant
CPU: 2 x Intel® Xeon® Bronze 3104 Processor 6-core 1.70GHz 8.25MB Cache (85W)
RAM 12 x 4GB PC4-19200 2400MHz DDR4 ECC Registered DIMM
Boot Drive: 128GB SATA 6.0Gb/s Disk on Module (MLC) (Vertical)
Drives:
    2.0TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM - 2.5" - Seagate Enterprise Capacity
    960GB Intel® SSD DC S4500 Series 2.5"
GPU: 4 x PNY NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 Founders Edition 8GB GDDR5X

Thanks for any advice!

[TofuBoy22]

Whats the price for all that? because it may be cheaper and easier to build a tower workstation then to go the server route.

[Kryczek]

If efficiency and optimal cooling are more important than price, I think it would be hard to find better than NVIDIA's own DGX-1 and HGX-1 systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAZS4V2aolI

You would probably be the first of us to have access to Volta, their next GPU generation The video above is a bit old so it mentions Pascal generation P100 GPUs instead of V100: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tesla-v100/

I don't know if Hashcat will work out of the box on a NVLink-based system though... It would be good to know.

I am also curious if they blow as much air as the very first (S870 then S1070) Tesla racks I procured ~10 years ago: we had a loud-enough server room that people were wearing ear protection then, one day, over all that noise, we were like "What's the jet engine sound?!"

More realistically, you wouldn't have to worry about mistakes in your design with these: https://sagitta.pw/hardware/

[tacohashcat]

1U rackmount with 4 GPUs just sounds to me like heat problems waiting to happen. I can't see any blown up pictures of that model, but if rack space isn't an issue, why not go with a 4U like the SuperMicro 7048GR-TR? https://www.supermicro.com/products/syst...8gr-tr.cfm

[Flomac]

I think you're starting at the wrong end.

What does your company need to crack? How much hashing power does your company need? Is time unlimited or pre-defined?
The 1080Ti is always the best option for new rigs, especially for somthing expensive like server chassis. Determine how much hashing power -> how many GPUs you need.
And even cracking with huge wordlists fits easily on a 128GB SSD. What let's me question all the HDD/SDD capacity. And the relativly slow CPU can be a disadvantage in some situations. I'd go with a single socket server and put a 12xx/16xx CPU in it.