Why Servers Needs Graphics Cards?

[CIS]

Hello,

 

Whydoes high end servers needs graphics cards? They use 8 or more graphics cards in one single server than RAM sticks they have added (but RAMs are having higher capacity of memory so don't worry ?)?

 

Best,

Chethiya.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Because they may be serving clients that send compute jobs.

[TheGlenlivet]

That and most Xeons (Which most servers/workstations use) don't have built in graphics to display output.

[Bananasplit_00]

they are probably GPU render farms in that case, they get sent stuff to process and sent back the result

[mariushm]

Most server motherboards have some kind of onboard graphics chip for 2D (text and graphics ) and some very basic 3D. They're kind of all-in-one chips, usually with 8-32 MB of dedicated memory. Here's an example of such chip : https://www.aspeedtech.com/products.php?fPath=20&rId=376

 

Independent video cards are usually there because of OpenCL or Cuda which allows programs to do some work using the video cards instead of the processor.

There are all kinds of applications that can use video cards, think physics, in various industries (fluid simulation, airflow computations etc) ... they're also used for rendering... think rendering each frame out of a cartoon... the rendering software can use multiple servers and multiple video cards in each server to render cartoon frames faster by having each video card work on parts of the frames.

 

Video cards these days also have hardware encoders for h264 and HEVC so video cards can also speed up conversions of videos (imagine for example a user uploading a 4K video he shot with his phone to a website, and the website needs to create 480p , 720p and 1080p versions of that video, so that people with slower computers or phones can watch lower quality versions of that video).

 

[Guest]

Considering that high end servers have lots of clients working on them, the workloads might consists of lots of different applications such as video rendering/video encoding/photoshop that need powerful GPUs to handle the workloads.

[KenjiUmino]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

-snip-

what he said.

 

most servers don't need anything but the most basic video output for initial setup and command line stuff - they will run headless (= with no monitor connected) most of their life

 

if a server has graphics cards installed it means there is some specific requirement for them cards to be there - mostly video or 3d rendering and computing (that also includes mining) 

[SnowyMus]

If you need to do a lot of parallelized work done such as rendering or physics simulation, as @mariushm said, using discrete GPUs are great for accelerating this task. If one expects to do a lot of parallelized work at once - something GPUs are great at - then it makes sense to install multiple graphics cards into a server. A single GPU can perform way more floating point operations at once (FLOPs) across hundreds or thousands of cores than two high core count CPUs while costing a lot less. People have been cramming as many GPUs into a single motherboard as they can for the purpose of mining for this reason.

 

Even so, not all high end servers need graphics cards, depending on their purposes. If it's a server that's used for hosting virtual machines, for example, then it may have a lot of RAM and a lot of CPU cores, but it wouldn't benefit from having a GPU.

[CIS]

Thank you so much guys, I can now understand the reason why servers needs graphics cards. Like mentioned it can be faster when doing something related to videos like @mariushm @TheBeastPC @KenjiUmino mentioned.

 

@TheGlenlivet yep, mostly Xeons are using a lot of graphics cards than a gaming user.

@M.Yurizaki mooooooreeeee clients.

@Bananasplit_00 hmm yeah, it can sent stuff to process and sent back the result faster without slowing down the main processor.

 

Thanks again,

You guys are my life saviors. I might ask weird or funny questions later on.

 

Best,

CIS.