What's this thing actually worth? Current bid is ~3k.
Hang around for the winning bid and you'll see what it's worth then.
Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
51–60 of 159 posts
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#52>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…
Does it come with a portable nuclear reactor to power it?
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#53What's this thing actually worth? Current bid is ~3k.
Remember that the buyer has to move it. If that costs $50K (no idea, totally guessing) then it's currently "worth" $53K
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#54Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#55My favorite part of SGI computers, like Altix and UV lines, was the NUMA memory with flexible interconnect. NUMA let you program a pile of CPU’s more like a single-node, multithreaded system. Then, the flexibility let you plug in CPU’s, graphics cards, or FPGA’s. That’s right into the low-latency, high-speed, memory bus.
There was a company that made a card that connected AMD servers like that. I don’t know if such tech ever got down to commodity price points. If you had Infiniband, there were also Distributed, Shared Memory (DSM) libraries that simulated such machines on clusters. Data locality was even more important then, though.
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#56For 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.
It was at #160 in 2023 when it was decommissioned.
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#57>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…
I can find a bunch of the E5-2697v4 CPUs on eBay in the $30-40 range. I wonder if there is a market for the SGI hardware.
So getting 8,064 of them for $3,085 - 38 cents per CPU - is great value for money!
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#58Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#59Never 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.
Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction
#60Earlier 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?
My answer was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the reality is that it depends on what you mean by "market value."
For the market of the auction, the selling price is the actual market value. Likewise, it's typically not too far off the value of the item in the wider market, assuming you are comparing it to a similar item in similar condition. The problem is that for most items purchased at auction, there's no similar item, readily available, to compare it to.
I've won multiple items at machine-shop auctions for a small fraction of their "new" price. The problem with the comparison is that e.g., the Starrett dial test indicator that I got for $10, and the new one that retails for around $200 are hard to compare because there's no liquid market for 30-year-old measuring equipment. While it's adequate for my hobby machinist use, it wouldn't be acceptable in a precision shop since it has no calibration history.
If you find an item where you can reasonably compare apples to apples, e.g., a car, you see that the final price of a car at auction is usually pretty close to the price of the same make/model being sold on the open used market. The slightly lower price of the auction car reflects the risk of the repairs that might be needed.