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Can a System Handle Brown/Blackouts on only the GPU? (infosec.pub)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am planning to build a multipurpose home server. It will be a NAS, virtualization host, and have the typical selfhosted services. I want all of these services to have high uptime and be protected from power surges/balckouts, so I will put my server on a UPS.

I also want to run an LLM server on this machine, so I plan to add one or more GPUs and pass them through to a VM. I do not care about high uptime on the LLM server. However, this of course means that I will need a more powerful UPS, which I do not have the space for.

My plan is to get a second power supply to power only the GPUs. I do not want to put this PSU on the UPS. I will turn on the second PSU via an Add2PSU.

In the event of a blackout, this means that the base system will get full power and the GPUs will get power via the PCIe slot, but they will lose the power from the dedicated power plug.

Obviously this will slow down or kill the LLM server, but will this have an effect on the rest of the system?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

It looks like regular PSUs are isolated from the mains ground with a transformer. That means that two PSUs’ DC grounds will not be connected. That will likely cause problems for you, as they’ll have to back flow current in places that do NOT expect back flow current to account for the voltage differences between the two ground potentials. Hence it might damage the GPU which is going be the mediator between these two PSUs - and maybe the mobo if everything goes to shit.

Now I am not saying this will be safe, but you may avoid that issue by tying the grounds of the two PSUs together. You still have the issue where if, say, PSU1’s 12V voltage plane meets PSU2’s 12V voltage plane and they’re inevitably not the same exact voltage, you’ll have back flowing current again which is bad because again nothing is designed for that situation. Kind of like if you pair lithium batteries in parallel that aren’t matched, the higher voltage one will back charge the other and they’ll explode.