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by pokemon-trainer 3444 days ago
>Is this extreme? Putting 140 TDP of CPU heat in a 1U server? Not really. Nick at Stack Overflow told me they just put two 22 core, 145W TDP Xeon 2699v4 CPUs and four 300W TDP GPUs in a single Dell C4130 1U server. I'd sure hate to be in the room when those fans spin up. I'm also a little afraid to find out what happens if you run MPrime plus full GPU load on that box.

What could Stack Overflow be doing that requires such a dense GPU/CPU configuration? I didn't think a commenting site would required that level of parallel processing.

4 comments

The GPU use is perhaps the most interesting here... Marc Gravell wrote a series of articles about it: http://blog.marcgravell.com/2016/05/how-i-found-cuda-or-rewr...
I know that several years back, they ran all their Stack Overflow from one multi-core Windows server (DB and backend and frontend). And they mocked the traditional Linux setup of multiple frontends talking to multiple DB instances with huge number of small VMs.

Makes sense the server should be really massive.

He doesn't work at StackOverflow anymore.
He was referring to Jeff's conversation with Nick Craver who does work at StackOverflow.