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Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
- queuebert 2y agoI wonder who buys these. Crypto miners? My institution would make it nearly impossible to buy a secondhand supercomputer.
- h2odragon 2y agoRecyclers.
- sambull 2y agoany I've dealt with definitely wouldn't touch the 'you need to hire professional movers costing you $10k's of dollars to get it out of the facility' stipulation - they seem to prefer the 'where's the location of the storage shed' situation.
- vel0city 2y agoThere's 8,064 E5-2697v4's in this. Those go on ebay for ~$50/ea. That's $400,000 of just CPUs to sell. If the winning bid is $100k, you spend $40k to move it out of there, another $10k warehousing it while selling everything on ebay, and you're still up $250k on the processors alone.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago> That's $400,000 of just CPUs to sell. But do you crater the market for those CPUs? What's the demand for 2016-era Xeons and how much of their price comes down to supply?
- ansible 2y agoI presume no one is building new motherboards for those processors either. While there is old stock laying around, you really need to run those systems close to as-is for them to be useful.
- pantalaimon 2y ago> I presume no one is building new motherboards for those processors either That's actually far from the truth, LGA2011 is quite popular as a budged gaming system precicely because CPUs are so cheap on the 2nd hand market. https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-X99.html https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-X99.html
- toast0 2y agoThese are high spec cpus for the socket though. Lots of room for people with compatible boards that want to upgrade. There's a lot of low budget hosting with old Xeon systems (I'm paying $30/month for a dual westmere system; but I've seen plenty of offers on newer gear); you can still do a lot with an 18 core Broadwell, if the power is cheap.
- alchemist1e9 2y agoAnd how much labor costs to earn that $250K? Once that is factored in, I’m guessing fair price is zero or negative. Plus knowing a bit about warehouse costs … your $10K is a bit on the low side don’t you think?
- bombcar 2y agoIt's for the processors alone - a scrapping company dedicated to this stuff would be able to actualize more from other components - and they often have warehouse space available that they already own. Let's come back and see if the auction failed; I doubt it will.
- bragr 2y agoThere's a whole sub-industry of people bidding on government auctions in order to part out the stuff. I'd be pretty surprised if the whole cluster got reassembled. But people on a budget will buy those compute nodes, someone trying to keep their legacy IB network will snap up those switches, the racks, etc.
- gabrielhidasy 2y agor/homelab will have a field-day getting those nodes up, some people will want just one for practicality, some people will want at least a couple and a IB switch just for the novelty of it.
- jeffbee 2y agoI can't imagine anyone from r/homelab has an SGI 8600 E-cell laying around that they could slap these blades into.
- gh02t 2y agoI can imagine it, some people on there are ridiculous, but yeah in my experience these supercomputer nodes are a lot more integrated/proprietary than most standard server hardware. It's not straightforward to just boot one up without all the support infrastructure. I'd assume they'd mostly be torn down and parted out.
- bombcar 2y agoYou might be surprised - because they're pretty custom they are often "more open" than you might expect; as long as you have the connectors you can often get things running something. Sometimes they have bog-standard features present on the boards, just not enabled, etc. It's the commoditized blade servers, etc that are stripped down to what they need to run and nothing more.
- gh02t 2y ago
- lawlessone 2y ago>Crypto miners? I think mining crypto with these would burn far too much energy compared to the ASICS in use.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoNot every crypto can be mined with ASICs. For example, Monero is ASIC and GPU resistant.
- latchkey 2y agoCrypto is no longer mined commercially with GPU type compute. When ETH switched to PoS, it decimated the entire GPU mining industry. It is no longer profitable. The only people doing it now are hobbyists.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoSome crypto is ASIC- and GPU-resistant. Monero is one of them.
- latchkey 2y agoMonero is pegged to CPU. I don't know why you downvoted me. https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html
- ceinewydd 2y agoSure, but you can get (much) better price-performance-power out of a CPU which isn't approaching a decade old, when mining ASIC and GPU-resistant cryptocurrencies like Manero. I don't know it'd be worth the effort to buy E5-2697-v4 CPUs which are running in such a specialized configuration over and above AMD Ryzen or EPYC CPUs in commodity, inexpensive mainboards.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoDepends on the price this supercomputer sells at.
- jfkfif 2y agoAcademic departments with low budgets and cheap electricity who can make due with old CPUs
- blakespot 2y agoThe comments in some of the news posts covering the auction popping up are curious / amusing. Lots of supercomputer hate - "let's use a few PCs," etc. ex: https://wccftech.com/iconic-5-34-pflops-cheyenne-supercomputer-auction/ https://wccftech.com/iconic-5-34-pflops-cheyenne-supercomput...
- 9front 2y agoSold for $480,085.
- bketelsen 2y agoImagine a Beowulf cluster of these. Sorry I couldn't resist.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Isamu 2y ago>Components of the Cheyenne Supercomputer Installed Configuration: SGI ICE™ XA. E-Cells: 14 units weighing 1500 lbs. each. E-Racks: 28 units, all water-cooled Nodes: 4,032 dual socket units configured as quad-node blades Processors: 8,064 units of E5-2697v4 (18-core, 2.3 GHz base frequency, Turbo up to 3.6GHz, 145W TDP) Total Cores: 145,152 Memory: DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank, 64 GB per node, with 3 High Memory E-Cells having 128GB per node, totaling 313,344 GB Topology: EDR Enhanced Hypercube IB Switches: 224 units Moving this system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company. Please note the four (4) attached documents detailing the facility requirements and specifications will be provided. Due to their considerable weight, the racks require experienced movers equipped with proper Professional Protection Equipment (PPE) to ensure safe handling. The purchaser assumes responsibility for transferring the racks from the facility onto trucks using their equipment.
- chasil 2y agoI can find a bunch of the E5-2697v4 CPUs on eBay in the $30-40 range. I wonder if there is a market for the SGI hardware.
- michaelt 2y agoSo getting 8,064 of them for $3,085 - 38 cents per CPU - is great value for money!
- kube-system 2y agoDump 8,064 old processors on eBay and you'll probably introduce some downwards price pressure.
- jazzyjackson 2y agothis is basically "free grand piano" - not so free once you hire the movers and tuners
- dylan604 2y ago
- jeffbee 2y agoI wonder what the point of liquid cooling such a system was. Were they pressed for space?
- Galatians4_16 2y agoBuilt in a bunker under a mountain, so reduced airflow, plus need to hide heat signatures from outside surveillance? Also, likely they had infrastructure available, from the nuclear power they use.
- eptcyka 2y agoDoesn't matter what conductor you use to move heat, the same amount of energy will have to be dispersed. And watercooling just implies more intermediate steps between the heatshield of the die and air. So I don't believe the heat signatures can really be helped.
- jeffbee 2y agoThis is a weather supercomputer, not a defense one.
- kimmeld 2y agoCheyenne Wyoming not Cheyenne mountain.
- calaphos 2y agoHas been really common in HPC for quite a while. I presume the higher interconnect/network of hpc favour the higher density of liquid cooling. Hardware utilization is also higher compared to normal datacenters, so the additional efficiency vs air cooling is more useful.
- convolvatron 2y agofor large machines the air setup is really less efficient and takes up alot of space. you end up building a big room with a pressurized floor which is completely ringed by large ac units. you have to move alot of air through the floor bringing it up through the cabinets and back through to the acs. its also a big control systems problem, you need to get the air through the cabinets evenly, so you need variable speed fans or controlled ducts..and those need to be adaptive but not oscillate. with a water cooled setup you can move alot more heat through your pipes just be increasing flow rate. so you need pumps instead of fans. and now your machine room isn't a mini-hurricane, and you can more flexibly deal with the waste heat.
- h2odragon 2y ago> the system is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray. Given the expense and downtime associated with rectifying this issue in the last six months of operation, it's deemed more detrimental than the anticipated failure rate of compute nodes. Even the RAM has aged out... Very hard to justify running any of this; newer kit pays for itself in reduced power and maintenance quick in comparison.
- Tempest1981 2y agoAre you trying to discourage others from bidding, so you can swoop in and win the auction?
- h2odragon 2y agonah, i already have far more junk computers than i need. I lusted after a Cray T3E once that I coulda had for $1k and trucking it across TN and NC; but even then I couldn't have run it. I'm two miles away from 3 phase power and even then couldn't have justified the power budget. At the time a slightly less scrap UltraSPARC 6k beat it up on running costs even with higher initial costs so i went with that instead. I did find a bunch of Alphas to do the byte swizzling tho. Ex "Titanic" render farm nodes. I've been away from needing low budget big compute for a while, but having spent a few years watching the space i still can't help but go "ooo neat" and wonder what i could do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E
- RobotToaster 2y agoIs this what they used to run the stargate?
- monocasa 2y agoThis is from Cheyenne, Wyoming, not Cheyenne Mountain (in Colorado Springs).
- brianhorakh 2y agoThis is Wopr! How about a nice game of chess?
- bibliotekka 2y agothe only winning move is not to play
- Workaccount2 2y agoFor those curious, Cheyenne is a supercomputer from 2016/2017 that launched on the 20th spot in the top500 super computers. It was decommissioned in 2023 after pandemic lead to a two year operation extension. It has a peak compute of 5.34 petaflops, 313TB of memory, and gobbles 1.7MW.
- observationist 2y agoIn comparison, 18 A100 GPUs would have 5.6 petaflops and 1.4 TB vram, consuming 5.6 kw. The speed of processing and interconnect is orders of magnitude faster for an A100 cluster - 1 8 gpu pod server will cost around $200k, so around $600k more or less beats the supercomputer performance (price I'm searching seems wildly variable, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
- martinpw 2y agoThe supercomputer flops are FP64. The A100 stats you are using are FP16.
- jeffbee 2y agoIt's fine. We will simply run weather forecast in BF16 mode and hallucinate the weather.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoweather forecasting is actually moving to reduced precision. none of the input data is known to more than a few digits, and it's a chaotic system so the numerical error is usually dominated by the modeling and spacial discretization error
- dgacmu 2y agoIntroducing our next supercomputer, Peyote.
- CamperBob2 2y agoA black Sharpie marker is even cheaper...
- 082349872349872 2y agoHence my simple theory of aesthetics: — if the best stuff from then is still better than good stuff from now, it's art — if the best stuff from then is worse than bad stuff from now, it's technology
- kibwen 2y agoMay I present my postmodern theory of aesthetics: - If it's useful as a medium for money laundering, it's art. - If it's useful as a facilitator for money laundering, it's technology.
- seaourfreed 2y agoThe only problem is that the super computer keeps outputing "WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"
- simonerlic 2y agoA strange game; the only winning move is not to play
- voytec 2y ago> It took us fifteen years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a system for the gate on Earth Samantha Carter
- monocasa 2y agoIt'd be great if this could end up in the hands of some group like the Living Computers Museum.
- pnw 2y agoUnfortunately LCM closed during the pandemic and laid off all their staff, with no sign of reopening.
- neilv 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_(supercomputer) > The Cheyenne supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming began operation as one of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computers. Ranked in November 2016 as the 20th most powerful computer in the world[1] by Top500, the 5.34-petaflops system[2] is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing[3] performed by NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient[4] than Yellowstone, with a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.[5]
- neilv 2y agoHard to see in the low-res photos, but is that storage from Supermicro?
- humansareok1 2y agoWhat's this thing actually worth? Current bid is ~3k.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoHang around for the winning bid and you'll see what it's worth then.
- humansareok1 2y agoAuctions by default almost always undercut the actual market value so no not really?
- organsnyder 2y agoIsn't the winning bid the actual market value, by definition?
- humansareok1 2y agoI think Auctions exist explicitly to potentially buy or sell an Item with a delta on it's Market Value? I.e. Buyers want the chance to buy below and sellers to sell above. Neither really wants to engage in the transaction at all in the reverse situation or even in the "Market Value" case. You would just make a direct sale and avoid the hassle of an auction.
- toast0 2y agoDepends on the terms of the auction. If we take the California legal definition of Fair Market Value for real estate: > The fair market value of the property taken is the highest price on the date of valuation that would be agreed to by a seller, being willing to sell but under no particular or urgent necessity for so doing, nor obliged to sell, and a buyer, being ready, willing, and able to buy but under no particular necessity for so doing, each dealing with the other with full knowledge of all the uses and purposes for which the property is reasonably adaptable and available. A 7 day auction on a complex product like this may be a little short to qualify with the necessity clauses, IMHO; there's a bit too much time pressure, and not enough time for a buyer to inspect and research.
- hggh 2y agoArchived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20240429122132/https://gsaauctions.gov/auctions/preview/282996 https://web.archive.org/web/20240429122132/https://gsaauctio...
- nickpsecurity 2y agoMy favorite part of SGI computers, like Altix and UV lines, was the NUMA memory with flexible interconnect. NUMA let you program a pile of CPU’s more like a single-node, multithreaded system. Then, the flexibility let you plug in CPU’s, graphics cards, or FPGA’s. That’s right into the low-latency, high-speed, memory bus. There was a company that made a card that connected AMD servers like that. I don’t know if such tech ever got down to commodity price points. If you had Infiniband, there were also Distributed, Shared Memory (DSM) libraries that simulated such machines on clusters. Data locality was even more important then, though.
- formerly_proven 2y agoCray XT/SeaStar? iirc the interconnect ASIC pretends to be another peer CPU connected via HyperTransport. HPE Flex is similar, but works via QPI/UPI for Intel CPUs.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoIt was NUMAscale. It’s mentioned in this article with some others for comparison: https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/07/16/what-if-numa-scaling-was-easier-and-cheaper/amp/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/07/16/what-if-numa-scaling...
- haunter 2y agoNever understood why can you bid below the reserve price, or more like why the reserve price is hidden because the whole point that they (the seller) have a price in mind they are not willing to go below.
- ansible 2y agoIt is playing on the psychology of the bidders. You want the bidders to be invested, to want to win the auction. To compete to win the prize. Also, consider this: if the reserve is too high, and no one bids on it, then everyone looking at it is going to wonder what it is really worth. If there are several other bidders, then that gives reassurance to the rest for the price they each are bidding.
- jeremyjh 2y agoAlso it would give feedback to the seller that the reserve may not be feasible.
- bombcar 2y agoIt's entirely because of human nature - you want people to get invested in it, which having them bid any amount does. It's the same reason an auction can go above the price/value of the thing, because you get invested in your $x bid, so $x+5 doesn't seem like paying $x+5, but instead "only $5 more to preserve your win" type of thing. See penny auction scams - https://utahjustice.com/penny-auction-scams https://utahjustice.com/penny-auction-scams - for an extreme example.
- freetime2 2y ago> a price in mind they are not willing to go below I worked for an auction, and sellers accepted bids below the reserve price all the time. They just want to avoid a situation where an item sells at a “below market” price due to not having enough bidders in attendance - e.g. a single bidder is able to win the auction with a single lowball bid. If they see healthy bidding activity that’s often sufficient to convince them to part with the item below reserve. Reserve prices are annoying for buyers, but below-reserve bids can provide really useful feedback for sellers. We even had full-time staff whose job was to contact sellers after the auction ended and try to convince them to accept a below-reserve bid, or try to get the buyer and seller to meet somewhere in the middle. This worked frequently enough to make this the highest ROI group in our call center.
- fnord77 2y ago> 8,064 units of E5-2697v4 Those alone are selling for about $40 on ebay. Let's say you sold them for $15 each. $120,000. Let's say the auction and the moving and the break down costs were $20,000. maybe worth it?
- bufferoverflow 2y agoYou won't find 8064 buyers of these CPUs any time soon. It will take many years, maybe a decade to offload. For example, in April ebay sold 79 of them. You're looking at ~100 months. And that's assuming constant demand.
- ceinewydd 2y agoI ended up reading all the documentation provided alongside the auction because I was debating making a bid. I decided not to in the end. In total, Cheyenne weighs in around ~95000lbs in weight, they require it be broken down in <= 3 business days on site and only offer 8AM - 4PM access. Therefore you'll need to support unbolting and palletizing all the cabinets for loading into a dry trailer, get a truck to show up, load, then FTL to the storage (or reinstall) location of your choosing for whatever's next. Requirements for getting facility access seem to mean you bring both labor and any/all specialized equipment including protective equipment to not damage their floors while hauling away those 2400lb racks. Liability insurance of $1-2M across a wide range of categories (this isn't particularly unusual, or expensive, but it does mean you can't just show up with some mates and a truck you rented at Home Depot). I'd guess you're looking at more like $25k just to move Cheyenne via truck, plus whatever it sells for at auction, unless you are located almost next door to them in Wyoming. Going from WY to WA the FTL costs alone would be $6-7k USD just for the freight cost (driver, dry trailer and fuel surcharges), add a bit if your destination doesn't have a loading dock and needs transloading for the last mile to >1 truck (probably) equipped with a tail lift. All the rest is finding a local contractor with semi-skilled labor and equipment to break it down and get it ready to load on a truck and covering the "job insurance". Warehouse costs if you're breaking it for parts won't be trivial either and you'd be flooding the used market (unfavorably to you) were you to list 8000 CPUs or 300TB DDR4; it could take months or even to clear the parts without selling at a substantially depressed price. It will take probably several thousand hours in labor to break this for parts assuming you need to sell them "Tested and Working" to achieve the $50/CPU unit pricing another commenter noticed on eBay, and "Untested; Sold as Seen" won't get anywhere near the same $/unit (for CPUs, DRAM, or anything else) and so even assuming $25/hr for fully burdened relatively unskilled labor, you could well be talking up to $100k in labor to break, test and list Cheyenne's guts on eBay or even sell onward in lots to other recyclers / used parts resellers. I don't think I could even find $25/hr labor in WA capable and willing of undertaking this work, I fear it'd be more like $45-60/hr in this market in 2024 (and this alone makes the idea of bidding unviable). A lot of the components like the Cooling Distribution Units are, in my opinion, worth little more than scrap metal unless you're really going to try and make Cheyenne live again (which makes no sense, it's a 1.7MW supercomputer costing thousands of dollars per day to power, and which has similar TFLOPs to something needing 100x less power if you'd bought 2024-era hardware instead). Anything you ultimately can't sell as parts or shift as scrap metal you are potentially going to have to junk (at cost) or send to specialist electronics recycling (at cost); your obligations here are going to vary by location and this could also be expensive -- the leftovers. If anyone does take the plunge, please do write up your experiences!
- bastardoperator 2y agoDonate it to https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/, assuming they want it.
- tombert 2y agoMan, if I had the space, the money, and the means of powering it I would bid on this immediately. It's so damn cool and will likely end up selling for a lot less than its worth due to its size. I've always been fascinated by the supercomputer space, in no small part because I've been sadly somewhat removed from it; the SGI and Cray machines are a bit before my time, but I've always looked back in wonder, thinking of how cool they might have been to play with back in the 80s and 90s. The closest I get to that now is occasionally getting to spin up some kind of HPC cluster on a cloud provider, which is fun in its own right, but I don't know, there's just something insanely cool about the giant racks of servers whose sole purpose is to crunch numbers [1]. [1] To the pendants, I know all computers' job is to crunch numbers in some capacity, but a lot of computers and their respective operating systems like to pretend that they don't.
- Animats 2y agoIt's really hard to find a home for large, old, high-maintenance technology. What do you do with a locomotive, or a Linotype? They need a support facility and staff to be more than scrap. So they're really cheap when available. The Pacific Locomotive Association is an organization with that problem. About 20 locomotives, stored at Brightside near Sunol. They've been able to get about half of them working. It's all volunteer. Jobs that took days in major shops take years in a volunteer operation.
- jasonwatkinspdx 2y agoAt the ill fated Portland TechShop I took woodworking classes from a retired gentleman, who professionally was a pattern maker for molding cast metal parts. This made his approach to woodworking really interesting. He had a huge array of freestanding sander machines, including a disc sander with more than a yard diameter. For anyone unfamiliar, pattern makers would make wooden model versions of parts that were to be cast in metal. The pattern would be used to make the mold. He could use these various sanding machines to get 1/64" precision for complex geometries. It was fascinating to watch how he approached things, especially in comparison to modern CNC. His major project outside of teaching the classes? Making patterns for a local steam locomotive restoration project. He had all these wooden versions of various parts of a locomotive sitting around.
- dekhn 2y agoDoes 1/64" precision really mean anything in wood, where small fluctuations in air moisture can cause > 1/64" distortion? I guess it's OK if you stay within a climate controlled area.
- jasonwatkinspdx 2y agoSo he would build parts by first making an oversize rough blank of bonded layers of marine grade plywood in a big press. Then he'd rough cut it various ways on a big band saw. Then he'd work his way through using all the sanders to slowly approach the net shape. He used precision squares to measure bigger stuff and calipers for smaller stuff. I can't tell you the exact stability of marine grade plywood, but I know it's about as good as you can get for a wooden material, and I doubt he'd go to the effort of such precise measurements if it didn't matter.
- mchannon 2y agoI once bought a far larger supercomputer. It was 1/8 (roughly) of ASCI Blue Mountain. 72 racks. Commissioned in 1998 as #1 or #2 on the TOP500, officially decommissioned in 2004, purchased my 1/8 for $7k in ~2005. Moving 72 racks was NOT easy. After paying substantial storage fees, I rented a 1500sf warehouse after selling off a few of them and they filled it up. Took a while to get 220V/30A service in there to run just one of them for testing purposes. Installing IRIX was 10x worse than any other OS. Imagine 8 CD's and you had to put them each in 2x during the process. Luckily somebody listed a set on eBay. SGI was either already defunct or just very unfriendly to second hand owners like myself. The racks ran SGI Origin 2000s with CRAYlink interlinks. Sold 'em off 1-8 at a time, mainly to render farms. Toy Story had been made on similar hardware. The original NFL broadcasts with that magic yellow first down line were synthesized with similar hardware. One customer did the opening credits for a movie with one of my units. I remember still having half of them around when Bitcoin first came out. It never occurred to me to try to mine with them, though I suspect if I'd been able to provide sufficient electrical service for the remainder, Satoshi and I would've been neck-and-neck for number of bitcoins in our respective wallets. The whole exercise was probably worthwhile. I learned a lot, even if it does feel like seven lifetimes ago.
- bri3d 2y agoWow, that's ridiculous. I bought two racks of Origin2000 with a friend in high school and that was enough logistic overhead for me! I can't imagine 72 racks!! Installing IRIX doesn't require CDs; it's much, much easier done over the network. Back in the day it required some gymnastics to set up with a non-IRIX host, now Reanimator and LOVE exist to make IRIX net install easy. There are huge SGI-fan forums still active with a wealth of hardware and software knowledge - SGIUG and SGInet managed to take over from nekochan when it went defunct a few years ago. I have two Origin 350s with 1Ghz R16ks (the last and fastest of the SGI big-MIPS CPUs) which I shoehorned V12 graphics into for a sort of rack-Tezro. I boot them up every so often to mess with video editing stuff - Smoke/Flame/Fire/Inferno and the old IRIX builds of Final Cut. I think that by the time Bitcoin came out, Origin2000s would have been pretty majorly outgunned for Bitcoin mining or any kind of compute task. They were interesting machines but weren't even particularly fast compared to their contemporaries; the places they differentiated were big OpenGL hardware (InfiniteReality) with a lot of texture memory (for large-scale rendering and visualization) and single-system-image multiprocessor computing (NUMAlink), neither which would help for coin mining.
- saalweachter 2y agoSo, people with experience moving this sort of hardware-- Let's say you just wanted to have this transported to a warehouse. How much are we talking, between the transportation cost and the space to store it?
- NickC25 2y agoWhat could someone possibly do with this? It's cool as hell but 8 years old.
- layoric 2y agoI dunno, I still think the 2011-v3 platform that these Xeons can run in is still a great setup for a homelab. A bit power hungry but if you can build a dual core workstation with 36 cores, and 256GB ram for <$1000, that is a solid server. Sure, a bit more power hungry, but that would still make for a hell of an app/db server. That's basically an m4.16xlarge, same CPU generation, platform etc, (yes, without all the surrounding infra) that will cost you something like $0.10 per hour worth of energy to run. Take the Dell T7910 for example (I use one of these for my homelab), you can pick up a basic one with low end CPU/RAM for sometimes as little as $300. Dumping all these 18 core E5s and DDR4 ECC on the market should make it even cheaper to spec out. Currently they go for about $100-150 each on the CPUs, and ~$150-200 for the RAM. Not bad IMO.
- gautamcgoel 2y agoThe listing says that 1% of the nodes have RAM with memory errors. I assume this means hard errors since soft errors would just be corrected. Is this typical? Does RAM deteriorate over time?
- dunham 2y agoReading the whole paragraph, it sounds to me like they were accepting 1% errors rather than fixing the leaking cooling system.
- fancyfredbot 2y agoIt's just not economical to run these given how power inefficient they are in comparison to modern processors. This uses 1.7MW, or $6k per day of electricity. It would take only about four months of powering this thing to pay for 2000 5950X processors. Those would have a similar compute power to the 8000 Xeons in Cheyenne but they'd cost 1/4 the power consumption.
- nerpderp82 2y agoIf you can get 1.7MW service, then you are paying utility rates, or around 100-150 per MWh, or as you quoted 4-6k per day. In Seattle, running this off peak would cost one about 104$/hr before the other fees. I would be neat if a subset of this could be made operational and booted once in awhile a computer history museum. I agree that it doesn't make sense to actually run it. https://seattle.gov/city-light/business-solutions/business-billing-and-account-information/business-rates#seattlebusinesses https://seattle.gov/city-light/business-solutions/business-b...
- whalesalad 2y agoWill it run Crysis?
- jonhohle 2y agoDespite being SGI branded hardware, this was after the name was bought by Rackable and IIRC, SGi hardware became essentially rebadged Rackable hardware. Still cool, but not as cool as some custom MIPS hardware from old SGI.