[HN Gopher] Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
___________________________________________________________________
Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
Author : zrules
Score : 157 points
Date : 2024-04-29 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gsaauctions.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (gsaauctions.gov)
| bketelsen wrote:
| Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
|
| Sorry I couldn't resist.
| Isamu wrote:
| You forgot to say First Post!
| Isamu wrote:
| >Components of the Cheyenne Supercomputer
|
| Installed Configuration: SGI ICE(tm) 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| So getting 8,064 of them for $3,085 - 38 cents per CPU - is
| great value for money!
| kube-system wrote:
| Dump 8,064 old processors on eBay and you'll probably
| introduce some downwards price pressure.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| this is basically "free grand piano" - not so free once you
| hire the movers and tuners
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That's just the current bid and it hasn't met the reserve.
| Locutus_ wrote:
| There is, but really only for the MIPS hardware.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| Given that the individual nodes are just x86_64 Xeons and run
| linux... it would be interesting to part it out for sale as
| individual, but functional, nodes to people. There are a lot of
| people would like to have a ~2016 era watercooled 1U server
| from a supercomputer that was once near the top of the Top500
| just to show to people.
|
| Get little commemorative plaques for each one and sell for $200
| each or so.
|
| edit: it seems each motehrboard is a dual CPU board and so
| there are 4032 nodes, but the nodes are in blades that likely
| need their rack for power. But I think individual cabinets
| would be cool to own.
|
| There are 144 nodes per cabinet... so 28 cabinets. I'd pay a
| fair amount just to own a cabinet to stick in my garage if I
| was near there.
| chasil wrote:
| These are blades, so there is probably some kind of container
| chassis required to run them.
|
| Using them as desktop PCs would likely be a challenge.
| electroly wrote:
| The individual servers are not watercooled. The compute racks
| are air-cooled; the adjacent cooling racks then exchange that
| heat using the building's chilled water. It's the rack as a
| whole that is watercooled. If you extract a single node, you
| won't get any of that. As the other commenters also point
| out, these are blades; you can't run an individual node by
| itself.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I don't think there's that big of a market for obsolete
| server pieces as nostalgia...
|
| But you could probably make a decent profit on just the CPUs
| alone parted out, even with the moving/handling costs.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| >...totaling 313,344 GB
|
| Can you imagine the RAMDisk? Yes, you can. Especially in 20
| years when it will be the norm. And also the Windows version
| that will require half of it in order to run /s
| christkv wrote:
| Does it come with a portable nuclear reactor to power it?
| CalRobert wrote:
| Is it not "Personal" protective equipment?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_protective_equipment
| queuebert wrote:
| I wonder who buys these. Crypto miners? My institution would make
| it nearly impossible to buy a secondhand supercomputer.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Recyclers.
| sambull wrote:
| any 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 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I _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 wrote:
| > 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
| toast0 wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| There'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 wrote:
| r/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 wrote:
| I can't imagine anyone from r/homelab has an SGI 8600
| E-cell laying around that they could slap these blades
| into.
| gh02t wrote:
| I _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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Oh I'm speaking from experience with the SGI
| supercomputer blades. They're pretty wacky, 4x
| independent, dual cpu boards per blade and all sorts of
| weird connectors and cooling and management interfaces.
| Custom, centralized liquid cooling that requires a
| separate dedicated cooling rack unit and heat exchanger,
| funky power delivery with 3 phase, odd networking
| topologies, highly integrated cluster management software
| to run them etc. I'm not sure if they have any sort of
| software locks on top of that, but I would bet they do
| and presumably NCAR wipes all of them so you likely won't
| have the software/licenses.
|
| I dug up a link to some of the technical documentation
| https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-6399-001.pdf . Probably
| someone can get it working, but I imagine whoever is
| going to go through the hassle of buying this whole many-
| ton supercomputer is planning to just strip it down and
| sell the parts.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah the licensing is often the stumbling block, unless
| you can just run some bog-standard linux on it. It sounds
| like this might be custom enough that it would be
| difficult (but I daresay we'll see a post in 5 years from
| someone getting part of it running after finding it on
| the side of the road).
| gh02t wrote:
| Ultimately SGI was running Linux and AFAIK the actual
| hardware isn't using any secret sauce driver code, so
| yeah if you can get it powered on without it bursting in
| flames and get past the management locks you can probably
| get it working. It's definitely not impossible if you can
| somehow assemble the pieces.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >Crypto miners?
|
| I think mining crypto with these would burn far too much energy
| compared to the ASICS in use.
| latchkey wrote:
| Crypto 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.
| jfkfif wrote:
| Academic departments with low budgets and cheap electricity who
| can make due with old CPUs
| jeffbee wrote:
| I wonder what the point of liquid cooling such a system was. Were
| they pressed for space?
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| Built 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 wrote:
| Doesn'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 wrote:
| This is a weather supercomputer, not a defense one.
| kimmeld wrote:
| Cheyenne Wyoming not Cheyenne mountain.
| calaphos wrote:
| Has 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 wrote:
| for 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| The heat's going to be leaving the building in liquid-filled
| pipes, however you architect it. And with 1.7MW of peak power
| consumption, a nontrivial amount of liquid.
|
| It's just a question of whether you want to add air and
| refrigerant into the mix.
|
| It seems they're decommissioning it partly due to "faulty quick
| disconnects causing water spray" though, so an air cooling
| stage would have had its benefits...
| toast0 wrote:
| > The heat's going to be leaving the building in liquid-
| filled pipes
|
| In the right climate, and the right power density, you can
| use outside air for cooling, at least part of the time.
| Unlikely at this scale of machine, but there was a lot of
| work towards datacenter siting in the 2010s to find places
| were ambient cooling would significantly reduce the power
| needed to operate.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Are you trying to discourage others from bidding, so you can
| swoop in and win the auction?
| h2odragon wrote:
| nah, 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
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Is this what they used to run the stargate?
| monocasa wrote:
| This is from Cheyenne, Wyoming, not Cheyenne Mountain (in
| Colorado Springs).
| brianhorakh wrote:
| This is Wopr! How about a nice game of chess?
| bibliotekka wrote:
| the only winning move is not to play
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| The supercomputer flops are FP64. The A100 stats you are
| using are FP16.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's fine. We will simply run weather forecast in BF16 mode
| and hallucinate the weather.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| weather 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 wrote:
| Introducing our next supercomputer, Peyote.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The Cheyenne numbers are 5.34 petaflops of *FP64*.
|
| The 5.6PF you quote for 18 A100's would be in BF16. Not
| comparable.
|
| The A100 can only do 9.746 TFLOPS in FP64.
|
| So you would need 548 A100's to match the FP64 performance of
| the Cheyenne.
| observationist wrote:
| Thanks, glad you guys caught that - could be generous and
| allow the tensor core tflops, since you'd more than likely
| be using a100 pods for something cuda optimized, in which
| case 19.5 tflops fp64 at peak per GPU, roughly 267 would be
| needed, or 34 pods, at $6.8 million, with 21.76 TB vram and
| 81 kw power consumption.
|
| Double those for raw fp64.
| latchkey wrote:
| AMD MI300x is 163.4 TFLOPS in FP64.
|
| 33 of them, which would also have 6,336TB of memory.
|
| I'll have way more than that in my next purchase order.
|
| It is really fun to build a super computer.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| I'm an amateur, but I have code that I think could
| probably dispatch threads pretty efficiently on the
| Cheyenne thru it's management system simply because it's
| all xeons distributed. If I can run it on my personal
| 80-core cluster, I could get it to run on Cheyenne back
| then.
|
| But hitting the roofline on those AMD GPGPU's? I'd
| probably get nowhere fucking close.
|
| That is the thing that Cheyenne was built for. People
| doing CFD research with x86 code that was already nicely
| parallelized via OpenMPI or whathaveyou.
| latchkey wrote:
| It is wild how much compute has grown.
|
| I put dual Epyc 9754 into my first box of MI300x.
|
| That's 256 cores + 8x MI300x, in a single box.
|
| Agreed, it is a great solution for CFD, which is
| definitely one workload I'd love to host.
| dekhn wrote:
| I used to build small clusters and use supercomputers and
| I can't imagine it's fun to build a super computer. It
| requires a massive infrastructure and significant
| employee base, and individual component failures can take
| down entire jobs. Finding enough jobs to keep the system
| loaded 24/7 while also keeping the interconnect (which
| was 15-20% of the total system cost) busy, and finding
| the folks who can write such jobs, is not easy. Even
| then, other systems will be constantly nipping at your
| heels with newer/cheaper/smaller/faster/cooler hardware.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| also, comparing SIMD with cheyenne is misleading
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Also, supercomputers usually use general-purpose nodes
| supported by many standard tools, multiple methods of
| parallelization, and (for open standards) maybe multi-
| vendor. I imagine this one is much more flexible than
| A100's.
| Netcob wrote:
| Aw man... I was going to use it for my homelab but that's
| 1696320W more than I can supply. Well... maybe if I use two
| plugs instead of one...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Bet it runs warm. The cat will love sitting on it.
| buescher wrote:
| It was at #160 in 2023 when it was decommissioned.
| seaourfreed wrote:
| The only problem is that the super computer keeps outputing "WANT
| TO PLAY A GAME?"
| simonerlic wrote:
| A strange game; the only winning move is not to play
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Hence 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 wrote:
| May 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.
| voytec wrote:
| > It took us fifteen years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a
| system for the gate on Earth Samantha Carter
| isodev wrote:
| I was just thinking how much of deep space radio telemetry this
| super computer must have seen.
| techplex wrote:
| https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxiL2_knQQyrYUenU0PCCcZZpzfQwCq6L...
| monocasa wrote:
| It'd be great if this could end up in the hands of some group
| like the Living Computers Museum.
| pnw wrote:
| Unfortunately LCM closed during the pandemic and laid off all
| their staff, with no sign of reopening.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hard to see in the low-res photos, but is that storage from
| Supermicro?
| humansareok1 wrote:
| What's this thing actually worth? Current bid is ~3k.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Hang around for the winning bid and you'll see what it's worth
| then.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| Auctions by default almost always undercut the actual market
| value so no not really?
| organsnyder wrote:
| Isn't the winning bid the actual market value, by
| definition?
| humansareok1 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Depends 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| My answer was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the reality is
| that it depends on what you mean by "market value."
|
| For the market of the auction, the selling price is the
| actual market value. Likewise, it's typically not too far
| off the value of the item in the wider market, assuming you
| are comparing it to a similar item in similar condition.
| The problem is that for most items purchased at auction,
| there's no similar item, readily available, to compare it
| to.
|
| I've won multiple items at machine-shop auctions for a
| small fraction of their "new" price. The problem with the
| comparison is that e.g., the Starrett dial test indicator
| that I got for $10, and the new one that retails for around
| $200 are hard to compare because there's no liquid market
| for 30-year-old measuring equipment. While it's adequate
| for my hobby machinist use, it wouldn't be acceptable in a
| precision shop since it has no calibration history.
|
| If you find an item where you can reasonably compare apples
| to apples, e.g., a car, you see that the final price of a
| car at auction is usually pretty close to the price of the
| same make/model being sold on the open used market. The
| slightly lower price of the auction car reflects the risk
| of the repairs that might be needed.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's exactly in this "now vs later" that resellers and
| other brokers sit. If they know that X will sell for $Y
| "eventually" and how long that eventually is, they can
| work out how much they can pay for it _now_ and still
| come out ahead.
|
| Cars are very liquid and move quickly, so the now vs
| later price is close; weird things that nobody has heard
| of (but when they need it, they need it _NOW_ ) will have
| a much wider variance.
| jtriangle wrote:
| The market value of something is what someone is willing to
| pay for it.
|
| Always has been, always will be.
| freedomben wrote:
| Remember that the buyer has to move it. If that costs $50K (no
| idea, totally guessing) then it's currently "worth" $53K
| hggh wrote:
| Archived version:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240429122132/https://gsaauctio...
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| Cray 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 wrote:
| It was NUMAscale. It's mentioned in this article with some
| others for comparison:
|
| https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/07/16/what-if-numa-
| scaling...
| haunter wrote:
| Never 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Also it would give feedback to the seller that the reserve
| may not be feasible.
| bombcar wrote:
| It'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 - for an extreme example.
| freetime2 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Donate it to https://computerhistory.org/, assuming they want it.
| tombert wrote:
| Man, 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| Does 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.
| mchannon wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Wow, 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 wrote:
| So, 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 wrote:
| What could someone possibly do with this? It's cool as hell but 8
| years old.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| The 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?
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| It'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.
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