Recent post re: AI as utility
Myself, I’m a fan of local LLM / self hosted ML… but if you ever needed a clarion call that a hard pivot is coming (soon) for online/ cloud based AI…Altman et al are making some concerning mouth noises (to say nothing of broader concerns with OAI, Anthropic etc).
Right now, I’m sketching out a plan where my Raspberry Pi (always on, 2-3w) uses a magic packet to wake up my modest AI server (Lenovo P330 with Tesla P4) if/when needed (Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B); no point in chugging down 80-100w, 24/7 for no good reason.
If the trend continues the direction it appears to be (increasing costs, environmental impacts etc) then I’d feel a lot better hosting my own as port of first call and replacing simpler tasks with more traditional programs. YMMV.
You probably could. A Tesla P4 or P40 (old data centre cards) are more than up to the job. My Lenovo tiny hosts a P4 (card cost $100 on eBay; the lenovo itself was $200ish) and runs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at about 20 tok/s. Smaller models are even faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F_5pdcD3HY
If you’re not bound by the one liter shoebox design, then the P40 is still a great and inexpensive card.
I think I mentioned elsewhere but right now I’m trying to figure out if I can use a magic packet from the Raspberry Pi to wake up the Lenovo as needed rather than leaving it on all the time.
Thing is, if I were going to do in house AI, I’d want to do it up right and from what I can gather, a system like that is going to cost me some jack.
If you’re already using node-red, the Wake On Lan node works well, and with node-red it’s easy to trigger the magic packet based on whatever trigger condition you want.
The only limitation I know is WOL doesn’t work after a power outage, because the switch and RPI doesn’t know where to find the target machine
Thanks for the tips on reusable enterprise cards btw
maybe, but the pi does not need to know that, only the mac address and the interface. the switch doesn’t need to know either because it’s a broadcast frame, it’s forwarded to all cables. the problem sometimes is that if you configure WOL from linux, the network adapter will probably forget on power cycling that it is supposed to react to magic packets. I think not all hardware is susceptible to that, but even then it could help to configure WOL in the BIOS
@SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zone
Maybe something else going on then, but ive never gotten WOL to work after a blackout when there’s two switches between sender and receiver. After powering up the receiver once, WOL works again
that’s probably the BIOS only loading the configuration on the first boot. you could try enabling fast boot or disabling the right energy saving settings in the BIOS and see if that fixes it.
Good tips - thanks!
PS: sad to report the 24GB Tesla p40s are now around $250 USD on eBay, so not quite as cheap as I remembered. P4s are still cheap tho, though frankly if you’re going that end of town, a 1080 is about on par, less fussy and probably cheaper - it just won’t fit in a uSFF.