Ask HN: I have 24 core server with 1TB of DDR4 RAM, what should I run?
16 points
19 hours ago
| 21 comments
| HN
First time I'm doing colocation and as experiment I picked up a 1TB DDR4 RAM server with 24 cores (around 2.2ghz each)

What should I do now? What stuff should I run?

I have a hello world Flask app running but obviously its not enough to use the full potential.

I'm thinking of running KVM and selling a few VDS to friends or companies.

Also thought of running thousands of Selenium browser tests but I do this maybe once a year, not enough to fully utilize the server 24/7

Help! I might have gone overboard with server capacity, I will never have to pay for AWS again, I can literally run every single project, APIs, database I want and still have space left over.

freedomben
16 hours ago
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I would definitely run KVM, and set up virt-manager locally and connect to the server remotely over SSH. Whether you sell VPSs to friends or not, you can use it as a quick scratch pad for spinning up different os's for various testing purposes, both long lived and short.

I have a similar piece of hardware but 256 GB instead of a terabyte of RAM, and that is what I do. It has come in incredibly convenient to be able to spin up VMs as needed. I started creating different VMs for purposes. I would have normally just used the same host for, and have really enjoyed it.

I also run about a dozen personal services on there, such as audio bookshelf, archive box, jellyfin, navidrome, and more. Surprisingly, the archive box instance uses quite a bit of memory and CPU, so the box does get a fair amount of exercise. I have not looked very closely, but I believe archive box is using that memory and compute mainly for running headless Chrome. I have a browser extension installed that archives nearly every page I visit automatically, so especially during busy browsing times, I keep that thing running pretty hot.

In the past I set up a self-hosted openshift instance on it, spread across six VMs. I actually loved that and the only reason I'm no longer running it is because I broke it by messing around with risky and dangerous things that no sane person should ever do, and then did not want to dedicate the time to rebuild it. Someday I will recreate it again.

Whatever you decide to do with it, this is a really awesome problem to have!

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changexd
5 hours ago
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I know that my colleague runs proxmox on this, you can do many things with it, my company is currently running proxmox and set up many vms as kubernetes nodes, I always appreciate people who set up their own lab, that colleague of mine somehow has enterprise grade storage server, nics... and many more inside his house just to have fun
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brodouevencode
16 hours ago
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Chrome with 12 tabs open
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pajeets
11 hours ago
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gonna need quantum computing once you breach in to the mid 20s
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rozenmd
3 hours ago
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Run a rails server, a DB and you'll probably not need to worry about scale until you're earning millions a year.
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RGamma
4 hours ago
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Maybe donate part of it to the NixOS hydra build farm? (not sure how easy that is). You can compile everything in RAM like that.
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austin-cheney
17 hours ago
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Simulations of maximum concurrency.

With hardware like that I would research a couple of things:

* Maximum number of servers, HTTP/WS, I could run simultaneously. I am working on a server application to do this right now. Each server should be 1, 2, or 4 ports. You could run HTTP over WS which allows both protocols over a single port. If you want to allow both TLS and insecure connections it would still be two 2 ports, or 4 ports if you are isolating HTTP and WS from each other.

* Maximum number of simultaneous sockets. I would test for the maximum number of open sockets connected to a single server instance and the maximum average number of sockets open to the maximum number of servers from the prior bullet point.

* Once you have confidence with both prior points I would then research the maximum amount of cross-talk. If your multiple servers can talk between each other then your servers almost achieve SMP. They could talk to each other via sockets like they are talking to everything else, but IPC communication would be even faster.

* Once you have all that then you have sufficient infrastructure in place to investigate more precise performance concerns. For example I have found that in my own personal implementation I could transmit messages via WebSockets almost 11x faster than I could receive the messages, but it could be that my own implementation is poorly executed. I also found that under the most ideal conditions my, likely poor, WebSocket implementation was still at least 8x faster than HTTP can go to over 80x and beyond performance after accounting for scale of high message frequency and socket concurrency.

* Once you have your performance bottlenecks identified you can then research performance bottlenecks on data transfer from a large data source of high frequency access. Then with that identified you can train AI on it for concurrency simulations that self-learns.

In the end you can sell your research. Consider that data centers require their own power plants to operate. While the hardware in those data centers is likely assembled in an efficient manner the software servers running on that hardware is often not efficient, and that costs millions of dollars a month just in electricity.

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5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV
10 hours ago
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Maybe you can scratch the experiment and downscale it? Seems like you are very very very far away from needing something as beefy as that. Unless you got it for very cheap, I'd feel bad having so much money in idle hardware
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ActorNightly
17 hours ago
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For research, you can do things like PSO or Genetic algorithm optimizations. Those benefit more from CPU than GPU cause there is not so much matrix math going on, especially for complex fitness functions that require sequences.

You could do this with the small Llama model, where the fitness function is basically the ability generate correct code and self detect errors, and adjust the weights based on the optimization algorithm.

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stn8188
16 hours ago
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Here's a random idea: run a freely available electromagnetic simulation agent! My favorite EM solver has an "agent" that can run on a server, you simply point your local GUI to the agent and take advantage of more computational power.

https://www.simberian.com/

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workfromspace
4 hours ago
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Doom and Far Cry are the two extremes I can think of.
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maz1b
16 hours ago
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I've been thinking about doing the same, seems much more cost effective. How much will you sell the VDS for?
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pizza
18 hours ago
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Fuzzers, caches, graph algorithms, climate models, massive compilations, in-mem filesystems, VMs, Llama 3 405 B (will be slow)
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evanjrowley
17 hours ago
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Test rowhammer attacks to gauge how resistant/susceptible your dense memory sticks are vs. other systems.
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jiehong
16 hours ago
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Some databases?

Make it a kubernetes node?

Make it run long async jobs like ETL kind of stuff.

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evanjrowley
18 hours ago
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Try llama.cpp with the biggest LLM you can find.
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pajeets
18 hours ago
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need a 3090 at least for that
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BizarroLand
15 hours ago
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I have a similar setup, but with 20 cores and only 144gb ram but a 4070.

I run proxmox on it, have servers for pihole and networking, AI, docker & portainer & jellyfin.

I've just about run out of the things I want to do with it and I barely use 10% of its capacity.

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zoezoezoezoe
19 hours ago
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Honestly, that is a crazy server to put in a datacenter just for fun lol, and i have no idea what you could do with it, selling VDS space sounds like a good idea, especially if you can find someone who wants heaps of memory. Though I'm curious if you dont mind answering a few of my questions: - Where did you colocate (ie what city), do you live there? - How much was it to colocate (you can give ballpark if you dont want to give the full amount) / do you pay monthly or something, did you pay per U or is it something else - What costs do you pay (eg electricity or bandwidth that you use) Thanks, and good luck xd
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hulitu
16 hours ago
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> Ask HN: I have 24 core server with 1TB of DDR4 RAM, what should I run?

Xbill.

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GiorgioG
19 hours ago
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Dokku
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pajeets
19 hours ago
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so 4 vCPU per customer + 40gigs of RAM ?
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dmitrygr
14 hours ago
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An electron app (maybe two)
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wutwutwat
13 hours ago
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crysis
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hulitu
3 hours ago
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> crysis

He needs a graphics card which is not yet on sale. /s

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