Multiple Ethernet connections one per virtual machine

[Medic873]

I am a student at Arizona state university, I have taken some machine learning courses in the past few years but have run into a problem multiple times now (A common bottleneck). Downloading all the training data from a server can take forever. Obviously this bottleneck is caused by my internet connection. I have taken every step I could think of to try and remedy this as much as possible. (Dedicated 1GB Ethernet card with a wired connection since my ISP speed is capping at 750 mbs download)

 

I had a crazy thought a few days ago, I was considering clustering together multiple raspberry pi's with a network switch to give each of them a 1GB Ethernet connection and having them all save the data onto a central ssd drive.

But after thinking this over for a few days I assume there is a much easier and more affordable method available by just utilizing a server.

 

I have just recently started venturing into the world of getting my own server. Everything I currently do is cloud based, but I was curious if it would be possible to purchase a server with multiple Ethernet connections or put multiple network cards into a server and give every virtual machine I launch on it a dedicated Ethernet line.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated, I have tried googling several things but all I can find is people talking about network bonding witch from my understanding is trying to take multiple Ethernet connections and speed up one instance, by spiting the load witch is a bit different then what I am trying to achieve.

 

Thanks

[emosun]

16 minutes ago, Medic873 said:

my ISP speed is capping at 750 mbs download

your isp would be the bottleneck then as adding more machines to your own network still relies on the same connection to the isp.

If you have a gb network adapter and fast enough drives on your end then the bottleneck is the isp.

[Windows7ge]

It doesn't matter how many physical/virtual computers you setup you're limited by that 1 ISP connection. I'd be extremely happy downloading files at 750mbps. If you need to access data this large regularly you should really consider setting up a storage server to house it locally.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Won't help, your still limited by the isp.

 

If you want to download faster you need a faster link to your isp, or a multiple isp links(but this won't always help much as bandwidth with home conections is normally shared.

[Oshino Shinobu]

As others have mentioned, for internet access, you're going to be limited by your ISPs one connection. 

 

As for having multiple NICs for VMs, you can do this by assigning a virtual switch to each of the NICs and assign the virtual switches to each VM accordingly. 

 

This differs from a more typical setup where you would have a single NIC and assign a virtual switch to it and then assign that switch to every VM. 

[Rusted]

If you are capped by ISP there is no way to make the connection faster with more Ethernet cards.

Only thing that comes to my mind is that if you can compress the data on server side before downloading it will be smaller to download. But I have no idea what kind of system you are running so I am just throwing ideas around.