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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Theres a non-zero chance that Linus Sebastian just did something really dumb. LoL.
If someone doesn’t know that person by name, here is a picture of him:
In case anyone confuses him with Linus Torvalds:
The CPUs are almost 10 years old. What are they supposed to be worth?
About $15 per CPU on ebay or so, so about $121,000 USD for the CPU’s alone
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.
That is true and all, but have it occur to you the person who’s spending all this might not care about money?
Next week we find out russia has their missile cpu problem “mysteriously solved”
Hope you’re joking, because this is not how any of this works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that’s too much, there’s always the home brew option: https://www.zdnet.com/article/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-raspberry-pi-boards/
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
here
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
Don’t think anyone thinks a hobbyist would be buying this thing.
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.
Homelab guys probably don’t have the liquid cooling infrastructure needed to pump the fluid.
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