101–110 of 159 posts
>Components of the Cheyenne Supercomputer Installed Configuration: SGI ICE™ 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…
It'd be great if this could end up in the hands of some group like the Living Computers Museum.
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 vo…
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang around for the winning bid and you'll see what it's worth then.
Auctions by default almost always undercut the actual market value so no not really?
Always has been, always will be.
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 j…
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.