Facebook Open Sources Its AI Hardware as It Races Google
wired.com
wired.com
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
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.
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 :)
You can buy high-end server boxes right now, with a similar configuration.
The FB designed hardware may be a little more energy efficient, easier to service, and it fits into their infrastructure better.
But it isn't fundamentally different than a server you can buy from, say, SuperMicro. You can buy and put together that kind of thing yourself, or you can get an integrator to do it for you, and have them do the initial testing and burn-in to ensure there won't be problems.
The appeal of OpenCompute is that if you know they're running 10,000 copies of this exact configuration, the kinks are likely to be worked out.
It isn't trivial to do this work yourself, even though I've built normal PCs before. Good blog post on building your own:
Facebook has a long way to go along with many other companies.