141–150 of 159 posts
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…
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I'm pretty sure it was ESPN and the NFL? The creator of the tech seems to indicate that and 1998 predates the first go around with the XFL. https://www.sri.com/press/story/the-first-down-marker-how-te...
The company with the original tech was called Princeton Video Imaging, in NJ. I interned for them one summer in... 1996? They had sold their tech to Padres and Giants broadcasts initially to put ads on the outfield. The first down line came a bit later and was a much better use of their tech. Princeton Video Imaging even got a shout out (1-line) at the end of every NFL game for a while.
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…
Really cool, do you have pictures or a blog post about this?
Never been much of a blogger. This was from a bygone era, before I (or anyone I knew) had a smartphone.
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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.
Going off one listing for a E5-2697v4, $50 with free shipping, 386 already sold. If you figure after the double-dipping of eBay/Paypal and then shipping fees, that's ~$30 profit per CPU. 8024 x 30 = 241,920 USD. Not too shabby for what's got to be some weeks/months of work. You could probably assume that they can sell or scrap the rest of it for a bit more as well, minus the fees for storage and moving company.
>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…
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 see…
For privacy reasons, I won't say who originally owned the servers, but they had a cool custom paint job and were labelled YETI1 and YETI2. If the original owner is on HN, perhaps they will recognize the machines and provide more information.
https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra.jpg https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra-open.jpg
>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…
The stuff I could quickly find was $1M+ in individual sales (not sure about auction sites and used).
DDR4 RAM $734,500 @ $75 / 32 GB for 313,344 GB
CPUs $484,000 @ $60 / (1) E5-2697v4 for 8,064 units
Figure the hard drives must also be enormous, and probably a huge amount of storage, just not sure on the quantity, and they may not be sold with the system.
They're not kidding on the moving company, that's 10's of tons of computer to haul somewhere. 26 1U Servers @ 2500 lbs each. Couple semi-trucks, since the most they can usually do is 44,000 lbs on US highways. Not sure if the E-Cell weight was 14 @ 1500 lbs in addition to the 26 @ 2500 lbs?
