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Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

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Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A macbook is cheaper though

training on MPS backend is suboptimal and really slow.

Do people do training on systems this small, or just inference? I could see maybe doing a little bit of fine-tuning, but certainly not from-scratch training.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI mind control abilities are also on the level of an extraordinary claim, that requires extraordinary evidence. It's on the level of "we better regulate wooden sticks so Voldemort doesn't use the imperious curse on us!". That's how I treat such claims. I treat them the same as someone literally talking about magic from Harry potter. There isn't nothing that would make me believe that. But it requires actual evidence…

What do you think mind control is ? Think President Trump but without the self-defeating flaws, with an ability to stick to plans, and most importantly the ability to pay personal attention to each follower to further increase the level of trust and commitment. Not Harry Potter. People will do what the AI says because it is able to create personal trust relationships with them and they want to help it. (They may not…

> What do you think mind control is?

The magic technology that is equivalent to the imperious curse from Harry Potter.

> The normal ways that trust is created, not magical ones.

Buildings as a technology are normal. They are constantly getting taller and we have better technology to make them taller.

But, even though buildings are a normal technology, I am not going to worry about buildings getting so tall soon that they hit the sun.

This is the same exact mistake that every single AI doomers makes. What they do is they take something normal, and then they infinitely extrapolate it out to an absurd degree, without admitting that this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

The central point of disagreement, that always gets glossed over, is that you can't make a vague claim about how AI is good at stuff, and then do your gigantic leap from here to over there which is "the world ends".

Yes that is the same as comparing these worries to those who worry about buildings hitting the sun or the imperious curse.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#214
post #80

Incredible! I'd been wondering if this was possible. Now the only thing standing in the way of my 4x4090 rig for local LLMs is finding time to build it. With tensor parallelism, this will be both massively cheaper and faster for inference than a H100 SXM. I still don't understand why they went with 6 GPUs for the tinybox. Many things will only function well with 4 or 8 GPUs. It seems like the worst of both worlds now…

I don't think P2P is very relevant for inference. It's important for training. Inference can just be sharded across GPUs without sharing memory between them directly.

It massively helps arithmetic intensity to batch during inference, and the desired batch sizes by that tend to exceed the memory capacity of a single GPU. Thus desire to do training-like cluster processing to e.g. use a weight for each inference stream that needs it every time it's fetched from memory. It's just that you can't fit 100+ inference streams of context on one GPU, typically, thus the desire to shard along less-wasteful (w.r.t. memory bandwidth) dimensions than entire inference streams.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#215
post #139
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the point here is that you do a direct write from one cards memory to the other using PCIe. In older NVidia cards this could be done through a faster link called NVLink but the hardware for that was ripped out of consumer grade cards and is only in data center grade cards now. Until this post it seemed like they had ripped all such functionality of their consumer cards, but it looks like you can still get it wor…

so whats stopping from somebody buying a ton of GPUs that are cheap and wiring it up via P2P like we saw with crypto mining

crypto mining only needs 1 PCIe lane per GPU, so you can fit 24+ GPUs on a standard consumer CPU motherboard (24-32 lanes depending on the CPU). Apparently ML workloads require more interconnect bandwidth when doing parallel compute, so each card in this demo system uses 16 lanes, and therefore requires 1.) full size slots, and 2.) epyc[0] or xeon based systems with 128 lanes (or at least greater than 32 lanes).

per 1 above crypto "boards" have lots of x1 (or x4) slots, the really short PCIe slots. You then use a riser that uses USB3 cables to go to a full size slot on a small board, with power connectors on it. If your board only has x8 or x16 slots (the full size slot) you can buy a breakout PCIe board that splits that into four slots, using 4 USB-3 cables, again, to boards with full size slots and power connectors. These are different than the PCIe riser boards you can buy for use with cases that allow the GPUs to be placed vertically rather than horizontally, as those have full x16 "fabric" that interconnect between the riser and the board with the x16 slot on them.

[0] i didn't read the article because i'm not planning on buying a threadripper (48-64+ lanes) or an epyc (96-128 lanes?) just to run AI workloads when i could just rent them for the kind of usage i do.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A macbook is cheaper though

4x32GB(128GB) DDR4 is ~$250. 4x48GB(192GB) DDR5 is ~$600. Those are even cheaper than upgrade options for Macs($1k).

No many consumer mobo support 192GB DDR5.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#217
post #43
post #3

Was it George himself, or a person working for a bounty that was set up by tinycorp? Also, a question for those knowledgeable about the PCI subsys: it looked like something NVIDIA didn't care about, rather than something they actively wanted to prevent, no?

He also documented his progress on the tinygrad discord

I feel like I should say something about discord not being a suitable replacement for a forum or bugtracker.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#218

Is this one of those features that's disabled on consumer cards for market segmentation?

I am sure many will disagree-vote me, but I want to see this practice in consumer devices either banned or very heavily taxed.

Curious as to your reasoning,

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#219
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so whats stopping from somebody buying a ton of GPUs that are cheap and wiring it up via P2P like we saw with crypto mining

crypto mining only needs 1 PCIe lane per GPU, so you can fit 24+ GPUs on a standard consumer CPU motherboard (24-32 lanes depending on the CPU). Apparently ML workloads require more interconnect bandwidth when doing parallel compute, so each card in this demo system uses 16 lanes, and therefore requires 1.) full size slots, and 2.) epyc[0] or xeon based systems with 128 lanes (or at least greater than 32 lanes). per…

Oooo, got a link to one of these fabric boards? I've been playing with stupid PCIe tricks but that's a new one on me.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#220
post #80

Incredible! I'd been wondering if this was possible. Now the only thing standing in the way of my 4x4090 rig for local LLMs is finding time to build it. With tensor parallelism, this will be both massively cheaper and faster for inference than a H100 SXM. I still don't understand why they went with 6 GPUs for the tinybox. Many things will only function well with 4 or 8 GPUs. It seems like the worst of both worlds now…

I was googling public NVIDIA SXM2 materials the other day, and it seemed SXM2/NVLink 2.0 just was a six-way system. NVIDIA SXM had updated to versions 3 and 4 since, and this isn't based on none of those anyway, but maybe there's something we don't know that make six-way reasonable.

What is a six-way system?
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