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Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

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Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#71

Post by bombcar »

haunter wrote: post #59

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.

It's entirely because of human nature - you want people to get invested in it, which having them bid any amount does.

It's the same reason an auction can go above the price/value of the thing, because you get invested in your $x bid, so $x+5 doesn't seem like paying $x+5, but instead "only $5 more to preserve your win" type of thing.

See penny auction scams - https://utahjustice.com/penny-auction-scams - for an extreme example.

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#72

Post by alchemist1e9 »

vel0city wrote: post #46
sambull wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any I've dealt with definitely wouldn't touch the 'you need to hire professional movers costing you $10k's of dollars to get it out of the facility' stipulation - they seem to prefer the 'where's the location of the storage shed' situation.

There's 8,064 E5-2697v4's in this. Those go on ebay for ~$50/ea. That's $400,000 of just CPUs to sell. If the winning bid is $100k, you spend $40k to move it out of there, another $10k warehousing it while selling everything on ebay, and you're still up $250k on the processors alone.

And how much labor costs to earn that $250K? Once that is factored in, I’m guessing fair price is zero or negative.

Plus knowing a bit about warehouse costs … your $10K is a bit on the low side don’t you think?

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#73

Post by jjtheblunt »

mk_stjames wrote: post #37
observationist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comparison, 18 A100 GPUs would have 5.6 petaflops and 1.4 TB vram, consuming 5.6 kw. The speed of processing and interconnect is orders of magnitude faster for an A100 cluster - 1 8 gpu pod server will cost around $200k, so around $600k more or less beats the supercomputer performance (price I'm searching seems wildly variable, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

The Cheyenne numbers are 5.34 petaflops of *FP64*. The 5.6PF you quote for 18 A100's would be in BF16. Not comparable. The A100 can only do 9.746 TFLOPS in FP64. So you would need 548 A100's to match the FP64 performance of the Cheyenne.

also, comparing SIMD with cheyenne is misleading

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#74

Post by fnord77 »

> 8,064 units of E5-2697v4

Those alone are selling for about $40 on ebay.

Let's say you sold them for $15 each.

$120,000. Let's say the auction and the moving and the break down costs were $20,000.

maybe worth it?

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#75

Post by fnord77 »

mk_stjames wrote: post #27
Isamu wrote: post #4

>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…

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.

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#77

Post by jeremyjh »

michaelt wrote: post #57
chasil wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That’s just the current bid and it hasn’t met the reserve.

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#78

Post by bombcar »

gh02t wrote: post #23
jeffbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine anyone from r/homelab has an SGI 8600 E-cell laying around that they could slap these blades into.

I can imagine it, some people on there are ridiculous, but yeah in my experience these supercomputer nodes are a lot more integrated/proprietary than most standard server hardware. It's not straightforward to just boot one up without all the support infrastructure. I'd assume they'd mostly be torn down and parted out.

You might be surprised - because they're pretty custom they are often "more open" than you might expect; as long as you have the connectors you can often get things running something. Sometimes they have bog-standard features present on the boards, just not enabled, etc.

It's the commoditized blade servers, etc that are stripped down to what they need to run and nothing more.

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#79

Post by bombcar »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #72
vel0city wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 8,064 E5-2697v4's in this. Those go on ebay for ~$50/ea. That's $400,000 of just CPUs to sell. If the winning bid is $100k, you spend $40k to move it out of there, another $10k warehousing it while selling everything on ebay, and you're still up $250k on the processors alone.

And how much labor costs to earn that $250K? Once that is factored in, I’m guessing fair price is zero or negative. Plus knowing a bit about warehouse costs … your $10K is a bit on the low side don’t you think?

It's for the processors alone - a scrapping company dedicated to this stuff would be able to actualize more from other components - and they often have warehouse space available that they already own.

Let's come back and see if the auction failed; I doubt it will.

Re: Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

#80

Post by jeremyjh »

ansible wrote: post #61
haunter wrote: post #59

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.

It is playing on the psychology of the bidders. You want the bidders to be invested , to want to win the auction. To compete to win the prize. Also, consider this: if the reserve is too high, and no one bids on it, then everyone looking at it is going to wonder what it is really worth. If there are several other bidders, then that gives reassurance to the rest for the price they each are bidding.

Also it would give feedback to the seller that the reserve may not be feasible.
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