10mo ago

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

www.tomshardware.com 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 glory days are over for Cheyenne.

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

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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.
  
  For the E5-2697 v4 that are in this server I see much higher prices even on Chinese e-waste resellers, about $45
  But I don't think that there's enough demand on the market for 8000 of them
  Maybe if you pair with those unstable "x79” Chinese desktop motherboards with server sockets and then sell them as package like "ATX motherboard with 18 cores CPU and 256 gb ECC RAM" maybe can find more customers
  For the ram they're going to make much more, 5000 sticks of 64gb ECC DDR4 are still expensive
  Edit: no, I accidentally saw the prices of unregistered ECC RAM. Registered ECC RAM is very cheap and super abundant as only servers use that. Corps aren't stupid and buy used memory for their expensive servers, so when a server is decommissioned, registered ECC RAM is dumped on ebay for pennies
  
  Ah I thought I saw v3 when I looked it up, so about double the price then but with fees (and probably low demand) my original estimate was probably correct enough
  
  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.
  
  I currently run 2 of these xeon CPUs in my server. When I specced it out I was looking at about $300/year of energy usage and that was running at like 50% capacity daily. The thing has half the cores disabled because I currently don't need that much compute and the only thing running on it daily is TrueNAS. It has ran multiple game servers and labs in the past few months and still doesn't use that much compute. Really just depends what you're doing with it.
- 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.
  
  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/
  
  What about the metal costs? Is this thing worth at this price for disassembly and salvaging?
  
  There are only tiny amounts of precious metals in there.
  
  False
  
  Care to elaborate?
  
  I mean there definitely are some valuable metals in there, but I can't imagine that this is a competitive price to pay for them, especially since extraction wouldn't be easy. And some parts do have value, even if it ends up being the case that running the full cluster isn't economic anymore.
  I do wonder who at this point could use all those processors (and Mainboards), but the ram might still be reasonable to use, maybe the cables, the cabinets themselves too. And I think the video also mentions that there are two managing servers. Those might be most likely to actually be useful for their original purpose.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Don't think anyone thinks a hobbyist would be buying this thing.
  
  So what’s the point in buying it?
  
  Homelab guys probably don't have the liquid cooling infrastructure needed to pump the fluid.

51 comments