[harrymit907]

I am working on a project which needs lots of RAM. It is just a search engine which needs lots of RAM to provide quick responses. I was planning to stack such boards and have a cluster so I can horizontally scale the search engine. Are there any recommendations for such boards which support lots of RAM. The only things that the board needs to support are a low-med end CPU such as i3, RAM (more the better), one SSD and an ethernet (100Mbit should be enough). Ideally I am planning to have a lots of such cheap boards and cluster them.

[ktta]

You might be better served by getting an older server motherboard. You can build a high RAM system (100+ GB) for under $200. The downsides are higher power consumption, and unpredictable BIOS behavior. But once you get it to boot the stability should be great

[moondev]

One Intel NUC supports 2x32GB SoDIMM. So 64GB per host. Each host also needs storage networking space and power.

If part of your motivation is the act of physical clustering then you can't beat those as nodes.

If you want cores with your RAM with more performance and less hassle, a modern Mobo with 8 dimm slots for 256GB RAM running vms across is faster cheaper and way more versatile.

How much RAM do you need? More than 256GB a host is basically the max for consumer hardware

[harrymit907]

I am looking at more than 2TB of RAM which will grow as more data is ingested. More cores is not a requirement for me. Right now I manage this using cheap dedicated servers and cluster them. But I spend close to 1.5k USD per month on this, so figured building this would be a lot cheaper in the long run.

[magixx]

I could be totally off, but would it be possible to use fast storage such as multiple m.2 SSDs on an addin card like the Apex Storage X21/HighPoint SSD7540/ASRock Blazing Quad M.2 Card? If latency is of high priority these options might still be lacking compared to RAM.

[heavyset_go]

Intel's ARK lies about how much RAM their CPUs can handle. For example, I have some SFF computers based on their Pentium Silver lines, that they claim can only support 8GB and I've successfully used it with 16GB. Same goes with 32GB of memory.

I would not be surprised if the i3 CPUs can handle much more than what Intel says they can.

[lavos83]

Are you sure you 'just' need alot of ram or also a lot memorybandwidth (memorychannels x speed)? With modern SSD's random Access performance as bulk alternative i doubt you are are just looking for RAM capacity.

[harrymit907]

I did a few tests with using a good SSD as swap but the performance is worse by magnitudes. So having RAM is the only way to go as of now.