Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction ends with $480,085 bid — buyer walked away with 8,064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs, 313TB DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, and some water leaks
Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction ends with $480,085 bid — buyer walked away with 8,064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs, 313TB DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, and some water leaks
The buyer is a comedian. His bid was 4-BOOBS.
Is that a good deal? I mean, it says "multi-million" and then it sells for less than 1/2 million, so I'm guessing good deal.
IDK, part it out on eBay?
The CPUs are almost 10 years old. What are they supposed to be worth?
Ian Cutress recently did a video on the topic here (I think he changed the title to reflect the end price of the auction), which does a bit of a breakdown. You for example also have to add shipping costs (from a certified company) to the price.
Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it. Goes to show how far technology has come.
I guess if everything sells you might make profit, but then it also comes with a lot of hassle and risk. And for actually using it, I imagine that electricity cost would be a huge factor.
Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.
Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it's not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn't make sense.
You also have to consider that the downtime's going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you're going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.
It's likely not worth using, maybe splitting the nodes out individually for colleges to use for research projects for a few years. The cabinets are probably worth something because of the graphics on them. The power consumption, lack of the high speed storage, and large scale industrial cooling system make it impractical to use. You would probably need an entire power substation in order to run it. You could probably install it at an industrial site, but you would still need to come up with networking and installation, which could cost more than what you paid for the thing in the first place.
$480085. 4 B00BS.
Inflation is wild. Just a few decades ago, you could get this kind of thing for just an arm and a leg.
313TB RAM?!?
The array's services were used by scientists across the state of Wyoming and the rest of the country when needed. The 5.34 petaflops system was mainly used for weather and climate studies, helping the National Science Foundation better study climate change and other Earth-related sciences.
Yeah that makes sense
Enough to run Chrome and 2 Electron apps!
Let’s not get carried away.
Those clowns who told me a RasPi would cover my needs will be proven wrong now!
Home lab for booba.
Finally, a computer that can run unoptimized Minecraft and the desktop Discord client!
(not both at once, though)
Mr beast: I bought one of the world's fastest computer and we are going to run the biggest Minecraft server in the world for a competition with 1 million players! the winner will get 10000 dollars and also I'm donating 10000 diapers to Angola
I don't know why anyone would buy this. Maybe it's one of those precious metal reclamation groups.
Generally hardware that old is cheaper to replace with newer more efficient hardware than to even consider running due to electricity costs.
r/homelab poster: "hey guys, check out my starter homelab! My electrical utility sends me a free thank you card every month!"
Selling for parts. Techtechpotato did a rough estimate and RAM/CPUs alone are currently worth and 1M (using eBay prices). If you add all the support components (network cards, mainboards, PSUs) it might be worth it.
The piecemeal nature of selling thousands of parts means the wages for a group necessary to coordinate it all would probably make the whole thing not feasible.
Ebay prices are higher than market prices imo. 15% ebay cut + 3% paypal fees + sales tax + shipping is brutal.
Yes and no. You can sell easily 2-3 units at the current price, but 8000 pieces...
Technology is improving fast, the E5-2697 v4 has a similar benchmark to a Ryzen 5600, which uses half the power, and making a computer with desktop components is cheaper (except for used registered ECC RAM which is being dumped for cheap)
And that Ryzen is the old generation, the newer are even faster
Does the hardware being all so arranged as it is in this manner to create a supercomputer make any difference to that evaluation? Like does the work of putting all the outdated hardware together in the complex way needed to make it functional for supercomputing make it potentially cheaper than buying more modern hardware but having to build it all yourself?
Some of those nodes are broken, it’s got coolant leaks and the processors are 8 years old. I read in another article they meant to replace it a couple years ago but couldn’t due to COVID supply chain problems (makes sense tbh).
What I’m saying is, it might be “assembled” already but due to the power draw, you definitely don’t want to run something this out of date. It’s huge. Might be a logistical problem to even get enough juice for this thing. Another poster pointed out it might need its own electrical substation. IMHO it’s only worth parting out. Far too expensive to run.
Those cabinets look nice though, with the Cheyanne graphic on the front.
Does the hardware being all so arranged as it is in this manner to create a supercomputer make any difference to that evaluation?
The storage drives for all of this have been stripped. You can't just run commands on the hardware... you have to figure out how to cluster things with software, buy drives for it all, have it all installed in a datacenter somewhere which is going to cost way more than the purchase price.
The labor costs for the technical people required to do this are way more than half a million a year.
Next he can install Skyrim and all the mods. ALL THE MODS!!!
