The glory days are over for Cheyenne.
  • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    48·
    6 months ago

    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?

    • Delphia@lemmy.world
      574·
      6 months ago

      Theres a non-zero chance that Linus Sebastian just did something really dumb. LoL.

      • Galaxy@lemm.eeEnglish
        323·
        6 months ago

        About $15 per CPU on ebay or so, so about $121,000 USD for the CPU’s alone

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
          384·
          6 months ago

          Have fun selling 8000 individual CPUs on eBay, so handling, storage, shipping… and even if that is for free it would only be 1/4 of what they paid. Not too mention that flooding the marked will mean the pieces goes down.

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
          7·
          6 months ago

          13% eBay fees, around $5 to pack and ship it, not including your time. Around $8 net per chip, so, $60k less returns/losses, then taxes on that. It might be worth it for one of those large liquidation companies, but they usually charge companies to recycle their equipment or pay very little at auctions.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
        21·
        6 months ago

        I haven’t run anything older than Skylake since 2020. I imagine anyone planning to run these either hasn’t done the math on energy costs or lives somewhere where electricity is dirt cheap.

    • golli@lemm.ee
      12·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        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.

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        1·
        6 months ago

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    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
      101·
      6 months ago

      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.

        • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 months ago

          I mean, even if some company has a practical need for it, or even just wanted to sell compute time on it, it wouldn’t be worth it due to the operating and installation costs. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me to see individual nodes from this poping up on /r/homelab, those guys are nuts.

          • Dkarma@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 months ago

            Homelab guys probably don’t have the liquid cooling infrastructure needed to pump the fluid.

            • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
              2·
              6 months ago

              It looks like each blade has 4 modules with 2 processors each with up to 9 blades plus management and networking in each blade cabinet and 4 of those in each rack. Liquid cooling is only an option, so it could be possible to run it on air only. I couldn’t find much on the cooling system other than it’s self contained if you have one if the separate cooling cabinets. It does look like is an air to water radiator. You could pay run it off of a pool pump or something.

              https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-6399-002.pdf

  • delirious_owl@discuss.online
    36·
    6 months ago

    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

  • some pirate@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    13·
    6 months ago

    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

  • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
    11·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
      43·
      6 months ago

      r/homelab poster: “hey guys, check out my starter homelab! My electrical utility sends me a free thank you card every month!”

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
      2·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

    • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
      1·
      6 months ago

      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?

      • Urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        4·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
        2·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
          1·
          6 months ago

          Didn’t know they’d taken out the storage drives but I was aware despite my general ignorance that it’s not turnkey ready to go. I guess what I’m wondering is, is there any part of the of the process involved in designing and building such a supercomputing cluster that is already taken care by buying it in the manner that it has been sold and could that in any way offset the increased costs of trying to bring such a cluster online rather than starting from scratch? I’m not saying it is the case, so much as wondering aloud for anyone with expertise to chime in, to see if that’s a way it could make sense.

          I understand there’s a mountain to climb to bring this thing in to a usable state for anyone, but could it maybe get you to base camp more quickly?