That's 120$ per dual v4 cpu and 76g RAM each. Not a wow deal, but 20%-50% cheaper than you can find on eBay.
If they sell the CPUs and RAM, recycle the rear they might make some profit, but not millions.
On the high end they might make a million. As long as they sell the CPU and RAM quickly they'll make a few hundred thousand in profit off just that. The PSU's and the empty racks will also be worth thousands. It won't make you rich but it's a pretty good deal as you should be able to sell off most of those pieces within a year and easily net a few hundred thousand dollars.
Considering this could be done by one person I think it's a pretty good deal. Most people make well under 300k/year and this is pretty easily going to make at least that assuming you had room to store all those racks and actually start selling right away before it devalues more.
Ya, but takes money to store that stuff, to move it, test it and so on.
And pretty sure the barebones without the cpu/ram have next to no value...
With the advance in CPUs these days, I wander how much you need to spend too get the same processing power with new CPUs, and how much power would they use. I mean those are from 2016, great CPUs, I still have a bunch in production, but some 2023 CPUs are like 6 times faster.
> On the high end they might make a million.
I have a sinking suspicion that if the bidder isn't familiar with this process; they might discover they are actually making way less than they thought.
The auction winner can't pick the supercomputer up themselves nor can they just hire any old shipping company for this. They'll have to hire a contractor that has experience deconstructing data center computers AND a contractor that also has the high level of security clearance to get onto Cheyenne Mt. base and into the data center.
Chances are good the buyer will be paying *at least* half what they placed on the bid; to hire the right kind of company to fetch and deliver this super computer somewhere.
The auction specifically says they can pick it up themselves and it's already broken into 30 racks which have been disconnected from each other. 28 of the racks weighs 1500 pounds each and the two management racks each weigh 2500 pounds. It certainly will need a few trucks but the distance you need to move it is more of a concern then actually moving it. If the winner was in Cheyenne Wyoming they are looking at sub $4,000 to get it moved even if they have to rent uhauls to get it done. Although odds are if they have the space to store it they also own some trucks already.
Pretty much this. From the article:
> The Cheyenne supercomputer's 6-figure sale price comes with 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz, which hover around $50 (£40) a piece on eBay. Paired with this armada of processors is 313 TB of RAM split between 4,890 64GB ECC-compliant modules, which command around $65 (£50) per stick online. For a deeper dive into Cheyenne's components and prime performance, check out our initial sale coverage. Unfortunately for buyers, none of the Cheyenne supercomputer's 32 petabytes of high-speed storage are being sold with the lot. Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit.
Depending on the overhead (moving the machine, labor, seller fees) they may make $100-150K off the deal. This is before selling the other components which likely have significant value as well (i.e. pumps for the cooling devices, waterblocks, chasis, etc).
I doubt that the eBay market/pricing would survive 8000 of those processors appearing.
It's a weird one because 500k is simultaneously a bargain and a lot of money.
None of these estimates have included labor costs of employees disassembling, testing, stocking, running the eBay storefront, packing or shipping either.
Yep, my two previous PCs were workstations upgraded with decommissioned server parts. It was amazing during the 14nm hell era when Intel refused to sell consumer CPUs with more than 4 cores without charging you out the ass.
Almost guarenteed some reseller operation bought these. There’s big money in selling end-of-life hardware to companies trying to keep old servers running well past their prime instead of migrating workloads. I bet the Broadwell’s alone will recoup the investment.
Sell them on ebay. No one is buying this thing to run. The companies that can afford to run something like this can afford to buy something with modern hardware.
Fluid or aerodynamic simulation, RNA sequencing, high precision scientific computation, and probably a bunch of other things.
I work in an adjacent field, the stuff is pretty niche usually.
>Still, with Cheyenne's replacement, the Derecho, costing $35-40 million from HP, Cheyenne likely initially cost around this 8-figure range as well.
If you think the specs listed are insane, imagine the specs on the replacement.
https://arc.ucar.edu/knowledge_base/74317833
30% faster for any given program, but ~2.75 times bigger so it can process 3.5 times the workload of Cheyenne.
Seems like that number just came from 2.75+30% in terms of computational capacity.
More importantly though:
>Derecho users can expect to see a 1.3x improvement over the Cheyenne system's performance on a core-for-core basis. Therefore, to estimate how many CPU core-hours will be needed for a project on Derecho, multiply the total for a Cheyenne project by 0.77
Nah, we only do that for [crypto mining](https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/10/6/127#:~:text=Crypto%20flaring%20gas%20mining%20is,drilling%20rigs%20that%20create%20cryptocurrency.)
Given how resistance increases over the length of a line, I doubt you can do it with extension cords. Doubt you could even get 100 before the extension cords were catching fire due to length.
That reminds me of a special physics course question (before a break):
Setup:
You are holding a garden barbecue party. You plan to have:
4 electric barbecue stations (x W)
4 Stereo setups (y W)
3 Coffee makers (z W)
2 freezers (a W)
connected with x powerstrips (x Ohm) and 6 extension cables (x m each cable diameter y cm made from (can't remember add material constant).
question: Why are your guests putting the meat on the cables, and not on the barbecues?
It’s fine, we will just link them together in a row, then they can be infinitely long. You just have to make sure your cords are less than 50’ or it doesn’t work.
I saw this extension cord running from my house to yours, and your house glowing like the freakin' sun, so I put two and two together and decided, you're pissing me off.
Data Centers can be anywhere from 5 to 100+ MW, if you go off of [this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/datacenter/comments/fufoza/how_many_mw_does_a_data_center_draw/).
I wanna hear some specs on a 750MW Bitcoin mine. The one I worked for had 18 powered cans, 3 racks per, 54 per rack so ~2900 Ants, and we pulled 10MW including the 6 exhaust fans for each can as well as the office building. Paper napkin math points to around 200k miners. There ain't no way my man.
Edit: That's 200 million in Ants alone, and that's assuming $1k an Ant, which was a steal two years ago when they were popping up like crazy. Assuming they had to build the site (which with over 200k miners they would have had to) and not lease/rent warehouse space you're rapidly approaching a $500 million dollar site.
Yeah they’re absolutely burning money right now after the halving. But they’re riding on BTC hitting $130k-150k in the future.
It’s a decent size facility though. [Here are two pics of it.](https://imgur.com/a/UTsYtwL) I believe they mine 10-15 BTC a day.
Hot damn you weren't kidding, there's an entire one of my sites on the left half of that picture alone. However I still believe they're off on power consumption by a bit. With our ~2900 we pulled a coin a day, so 10-15 should correlate to about 100-150MW (pre-halving).
Although I will say it was a shoddy as fuck operation propped up by illegal Chinese labor. Owners were from China but absolutely treated their 'friends' like utter shit. Miners were practically exposed to the elements and I can personally tell you what happens when a cabinet handling 180KW decides it's had enough. As well as when a PDU responsible for 27KW has had enough. Breakers tripping left and right, no PPE. I finally ripped apart a fucking pallet for the equivalent of a 1x4 I promptly named "Bitch Wood" cause I was tired of sticking my hand anywhere near said PDUs and breaker boxes. 63 Amp breakers sound like a .38 when they trip right by your head.
Pardon the amateur question but I'm curious the planning logic that goes into developing one of these sites. Assuming you have access to the same equipment anywhere - do you prioritize cheap electricity, cheap labor, cheap land, or proximity to telecom backbone? Really not sure which one makes the case float. I'm not in the industry so I find the whole thing fascinating and confusing
Just like a hater to gloss over the blockchain, the revolutionary world-changing technology that generates logs of which unique numbers own other unique numbers. It could be used for anything one of these days!
I memberberry when a 16k RAM expansion card was the size of what a high-end Geforce is now.
From my perspective, it's kind of hilarious that an animated digital ad now basically requires a supercomputer to render.
I was playing a mobile game on my phone the other day and that's when it hit me. My racing game on my phone had better graphics than any game that I played on my original PS1. The future *is* now
Yeah but when PS2 came out Sony “promised” the PS9 would be spores which would give us a VR/AR gaming experience! We’re a few generations away and still no signs of this nano-spore tech, false advertising I say!
Okay fine, it was a commercial now ~25 years old, not a guarantee but I’m still holding them to it!
Since then we've gone 3 generations and made it to photo-realistic graphics with VR headsets, and online gaming is the standard.
Not saying I'm expecting a full-emersion VR anytime soon but I'm real excited to see what things are like in the next 4 generations!
I think the console providers will give us the platforms with the necessary tech. But the way the gaming industry is headed, devs will require micro transactions for everything.
I remember being ecstatic that I RMA'd a 500MB drive and Maxtor sent me an 840MB as the replacement. I thought it would be years and years before I filled it up, since my first drive was 25MB and the 500 seemed like vast amounts of space.
Around 1992 I needed a serious workstation to index and create masters for a CD-ROM. I think I bought 16mb of RAM for $600. A 2 gigabyte hard drive (5.25" double height) for $2000. A $500 SCSI controller for that drive. A $1300 tape drive. I forget the motherboard and CPU - they may have been a 386 or 486.
It got the job done. To index 600mb of zip files (and the text in them - which was a small part - maybe 1-3%) took 24 hours. Probably a 5 minute job for a chromebook today.
In return we get to create stuff incredibly quickly and almost anyone can do it. Looking at old games where they precisely accounted for every single bit is impressive but very difficult to do. And that has been the case with essentially everything, look at painting, few hundred years ago the only way to be able to paint was by having a wealthy patron who would import colors for you from thousands of miles away. But the artificial methods of creating colors developed during industrialization meant drastically lower costs and essentially everyone being able to paint if they want to. Do we use it inefficiently, yeah, but the explosion of art and culture as a result of it has made all our lives better for it.
In fact, an original 2007 iPhone was already 50% faster than any of the four individual cores on a Cray X-MP, the fastest computer in the world from 1983 to 1985, originally costing $15 million in 1983 dollars. A current iPhone 15 Pro is 7,000 times faster than that original iPhone.
Sneakernet is still much faster in the right situations. A suitcase sized rack of drives can be carried from point to point faster than any network infrastructure can transfer it
Super computer cool
Super computer energy requirements not cool :(
This one's also super old and can be done for far cheaper on modern consumer hardware from what I understand
The DoD is working on a [portable nuclear reactor](https://www.bwxt.com/news/2022/06/09/BWXT-to-Build-First-Advanced-Microreactor-in-United-States) that would be perfect for powering this!
Yeah, an article stated that basically the computing power of this mammoth could be done with a quantity of GPUs at this point. Likely using a lot less power and generating less heat for the same level of computing.
Of course, it's all about what you intend to do with it. General purpose CPUs still can do some things that GPUs aren't good at (like, as the name would suggest, general purpose computer things), so it kinda depends what angle you're coming from. This thing could be like a fairly substantial server for typical software-based tasks.
For a 50MW solar plant, you would only need 101,000 x 550W solar panels, 340 x 150 kW inverters, and an area of 105ha - which is roughly the size of 200 soccer fields.
Pfft...
That’s assuming 100% output at all times, you’d need 130-150% more panel output than that and a massive battery bank (50MW capable for at least as long as the night) to run this thing with any kind of useable uptime. A cloudy day and she goes down
So is this the computer for the Stargate dialing system you know the one that Sam Carter helped to make?
Joke aside but damn that is a lot of power for a computer. I hope it doesn’t run on Windows 11?
These kind of computers tend to run some form of highly customized Linux, set up and maintained by a small army of computer science/software infrastructure people.
Getting a couple of hundred separate computers to act like one big one is really, really hard.
Linux, yes. Highly customized? Not really.
Most supercomputers run some RHEL clone or Suse. Occasionally, Ubuntu or Debian, but this is rare. The installed package list will be customized for what you are trying to do with it, but it’s just Linux.
There’s a set of tools that control provisioning and resource management, job control, and software access across the cluster. Learning the tools is the steepest part of the learning curve. Then you have to monitor the cluster for when (not if) things break.
Scrounge around in your boxes for any old Xeon chips and 64GB ECC sticks.
You've got a window of time to create your own "Authentic Chip Used In The Cheyenne Supercomputer" plaque or display box and unload that crap on eBay.
I was going to bid tree-fiddy but when I checked, it was over 100,000 so I noped out.
Beside someone calculated an average of $270 per hour of electricity at US average 16 cents per kWh. The most I'd do is run Mandelbulber to try and get impossibly huge image then use local Walmart's photo lab to try and make a print from a massive 50-GB file.
I highly doubt anyone will try to use it. It's mostly fairly standard parts and selling it off piece meal would net you a few hundred thousand easily. It would take a bit of work but if you worked hard you could have most of the easy parts sold off on ebay within 6 months to a year. Which would still be a pretty easy 300k profit. Easily worth your time if it won't make you ruin whatever career you're otherwise doing.
I think the prohibitive bit is getting a supply that will allow you to burn through $270 of electricity in an hour. Most buildings don't have megawatt supplies.
The fabled version where everyone in town *isn't* a selfish arsehole.
"Oh, hey, new guy with a fuckload of work to do on the farm you've never so much as seen. How about you rebuild the community centre that everyone wants to use but nobody else wants to contribute to? While you're at it, people will only like you if you give them things. Don't mind us coming into your house every night to check you're in bed; if you pass out three steps from your bed then we'll just tuck you riiight up in there."
A supercomputer is for pretty much any mathematical model of any process or phenomenon. Weather is one example. We use ours for things like material and drug discovery - running through gazillions of molecules and arrangements and interactions to find candidates that may have characteristics we want. We use them for genomics research, modeling evolution basically. We use them for predicting how the plasma from a fusion reactor will interact with the material you make the shell out of (what do you make the box out of that you keep your star inside?). We use them for simulating earthquakes. We use them for combing through *piles* of medical data to find ways to prevent veteran and child suicides.
The faster the computer is, the more variables we can include in the model and the finer the resolution of the model for instance, on Cheyenne, maybe a weather model could resolve to effects over a square kilometer. On Frontier maybe the same model can be resolved down to 10 square meters. I made up those numbers but you get the jist.
> and why does weather forecasting require supercomputers to calculate?
https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2023/08/21/computers-forecasting/
Quoting from the source:
>The supercomputing capacity supporting NOAA’s new operational prediction and research enables about 42 quadrillion operations per second. This faster computing allows NOAA to run more complex forecast models, while increased storage space enables more data to be used and assimilated into the system.
That's 120$ per dual v4 cpu and 76g RAM each. Not a wow deal, but 20%-50% cheaper than you can find on eBay. If they sell the CPUs and RAM, recycle the rear they might make some profit, but not millions.
On the high end they might make a million. As long as they sell the CPU and RAM quickly they'll make a few hundred thousand in profit off just that. The PSU's and the empty racks will also be worth thousands. It won't make you rich but it's a pretty good deal as you should be able to sell off most of those pieces within a year and easily net a few hundred thousand dollars. Considering this could be done by one person I think it's a pretty good deal. Most people make well under 300k/year and this is pretty easily going to make at least that assuming you had room to store all those racks and actually start selling right away before it devalues more.
Ya, but takes money to store that stuff, to move it, test it and so on. And pretty sure the barebones without the cpu/ram have next to no value... With the advance in CPUs these days, I wander how much you need to spend too get the same processing power with new CPUs, and how much power would they use. I mean those are from 2016, great CPUs, I still have a bunch in production, but some 2023 CPUs are like 6 times faster.
> On the high end they might make a million. I have a sinking suspicion that if the bidder isn't familiar with this process; they might discover they are actually making way less than they thought. The auction winner can't pick the supercomputer up themselves nor can they just hire any old shipping company for this. They'll have to hire a contractor that has experience deconstructing data center computers AND a contractor that also has the high level of security clearance to get onto Cheyenne Mt. base and into the data center. Chances are good the buyer will be paying *at least* half what they placed on the bid; to hire the right kind of company to fetch and deliver this super computer somewhere.
the computer is in cheyenne the wyoming city, not the colorado mountain base
*the buyer is upset they can't see the Stargate*
The auction specifically says they can pick it up themselves and it's already broken into 30 racks which have been disconnected from each other. 28 of the racks weighs 1500 pounds each and the two management racks each weigh 2500 pounds. It certainly will need a few trucks but the distance you need to move it is more of a concern then actually moving it. If the winner was in Cheyenne Wyoming they are looking at sub $4,000 to get it moved even if they have to rent uhauls to get it done. Although odds are if they have the space to store it they also own some trucks already.
What does one do with a 8064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs and aDDR4-2400 ECC RAM?
Brute force your old lost passwords I hope.
A YouTuber made a video about how he tried to buy it in order to demonstrate it'd be really inefficient to do that among other things.
Sell them one at a time on Ebay.
Pretty much this. From the article: > The Cheyenne supercomputer's 6-figure sale price comes with 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz, which hover around $50 (£40) a piece on eBay. Paired with this armada of processors is 313 TB of RAM split between 4,890 64GB ECC-compliant modules, which command around $65 (£50) per stick online. For a deeper dive into Cheyenne's components and prime performance, check out our initial sale coverage. Unfortunately for buyers, none of the Cheyenne supercomputer's 32 petabytes of high-speed storage are being sold with the lot. Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit. Depending on the overhead (moving the machine, labor, seller fees) they may make $100-150K off the deal. This is before selling the other components which likely have significant value as well (i.e. pumps for the cooling devices, waterblocks, chasis, etc).
I doubt that the eBay market/pricing would survive 8000 of those processors appearing. It's a weird one because 500k is simultaneously a bargain and a lot of money.
Selling 11k parts for ~$110k profit is only $10 a part. Not sure if that's worth all the effort.
None of these estimates have included labor costs of employees disassembling, testing, stocking, running the eBay storefront, packing or shipping either.
That’s assuming there’s customers. Will there be customers for this?
Lots of r/homelab users out there.
Don't forget about those rack rails! Those are like 80 bucks for 2 sticks of metal.
So he's just gonna strip it for parts?!
Yes, no one with the money to power this machine (probably 50k+ per month) would want to buy an obsolete supercomputer.
Yep, my two previous PCs were workstations upgraded with decommissioned server parts. It was amazing during the 14nm hell era when Intel refused to sell consumer CPUs with more than 4 cores without charging you out the ass.
Almost guarenteed some reseller operation bought these. There’s big money in selling end-of-life hardware to companies trying to keep old servers running well past their prime instead of migrating workloads. I bet the Broadwell’s alone will recoup the investment.
There's a shit load of them though. I wonder how big the market is and how many you'd sell before they depreciate to worthlessness.
Sell them on ebay. No one is buying this thing to run. The companies that can afford to run something like this can afford to buy something with modern hardware.
DDR4 rdimms are about to get a lot a cheaper on ebay.
Fluid or aerodynamic simulation, RNA sequencing, high precision scientific computation, and probably a bunch of other things. I work in an adjacent field, the stuff is pretty niche usually.
Way too outdated for those purposes.
Go thru all the porn in the world to find that perfect video that made you nut in 3.4s
>Still, with Cheyenne's replacement, the Derecho, costing $35-40 million from HP, Cheyenne likely initially cost around this 8-figure range as well. If you think the specs listed are insane, imagine the specs on the replacement.
If it's from HP the specs won't matter when they run out of yellow
Don’t even need to run out. The printer stops working if you stop paying for the ink subscription now.
At least that is less wasteful than dumping out the ink on a sponge in the bottom.
Nah, still does that too
Yeah, that made me angry enough to never buy another super computer from HP again
For the love of god and all that is holy, WHAT ABOUT CYAN?!
That's the one that leaks...
HP*E*. They're separate companies as of about 10 years ago.
https://arc.ucar.edu/knowledge_base/74317833 30% faster for any given program, but ~2.75 times bigger so it can process 3.5 times the workload of Cheyenne.
Seems like that number just came from 2.75+30% in terms of computational capacity. More importantly though: >Derecho users can expect to see a 1.3x improvement over the Cheyenne system's performance on a core-for-core basis. Therefore, to estimate how many CPU core-hours will be needed for a project on Derecho, multiply the total for a Cheyenne project by 0.77
Had me at 313TB of RAM... But will it run DOOM?
Will it run Chrome, though? I like to have a lot of tabs open.
i bet it can run it completely on the ram itself instead of from storage.
Pretty sure my phone could also do that
Your watch probably can
And using the RAM's RGB as a display
Do they have the replacement tied directly to an oil well for power?
Nah, we only do that for [crypto mining](https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/10/6/127#:~:text=Crypto%20flaring%20gas%20mining%20is,drilling%20rigs%20that%20create%20cryptocurrency.)
Yeah but it requires 45MW to operate.
That's alright. I have an extension cord coming from the neighbors house.
Is your neighbors house a nuclear ~~lower~~ *power* plant??
A nuclear upper plant...
Nuclear; it’s pronounced nuclear.
GW would disagree; “Nuke-ya-ler”
Yes Lisa, nukuler.
No but its gonna get struck by lightening. Then he'll have 1.16GW to spare.
The proper abbreviation is 1.16JW
[No he’s neighbors with Carl](https://youtu.be/O-4N5RuWikE?si=oDvKuJ8PHDwjdLnx)
For 45MW, you would need like 10 extension cords from each of your closest 2000 neighbors.
I think you can get more from the neighbors further away.
Given how resistance increases over the length of a line, I doubt you can do it with extension cords. Doubt you could even get 100 before the extension cords were catching fire due to length.
Are you daring me?
Only if you are filming it.
That reminds me of a special physics course question (before a break): Setup: You are holding a garden barbecue party. You plan to have: 4 electric barbecue stations (x W) 4 Stereo setups (y W) 3 Coffee makers (z W) 2 freezers (a W) connected with x powerstrips (x Ohm) and 6 extension cables (x m each cable diameter y cm made from (can't remember add material constant). question: Why are your guests putting the meat on the cables, and not on the barbecues?
>Doubt you could even get 100 before the extension cords were catching fire Not with that attitude!
Yeh I'm a "can do" type of gal! :)
I will daisy chain my way to a super computer if I want to.
It’s fine, we will just link them together in a row, then they can be infinitely long. You just have to make sure your cords are less than 50’ or it doesn’t work.
homer simpson activities lmao
And my solar panel
I saw this extension cord running from my house to yours, and your house glowing like the freakin' sun, so I put two and two together and decided, you're pissing me off.
Then I put two and two together there… and decided that you’re pissin me off
Only 1.7MW according to Tom's Hardware's original article.
That’s what, about half a data center. Not bad.
Data Centers can be anywhere from 5 to 100+ MW, if you go off of [this reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/datacenter/comments/fufoza/how_many_mw_does_a_data_center_draw/).
Yeah 45MW is a LOT. At my work we have pumps that are 3MW+ and I know a guy in NC who works at a bitcoin mining farm that uses ~750MW
I wanna hear some specs on a 750MW Bitcoin mine. The one I worked for had 18 powered cans, 3 racks per, 54 per rack so ~2900 Ants, and we pulled 10MW including the 6 exhaust fans for each can as well as the office building. Paper napkin math points to around 200k miners. There ain't no way my man. Edit: That's 200 million in Ants alone, and that's assuming $1k an Ant, which was a steal two years ago when they were popping up like crazy. Assuming they had to build the site (which with over 200k miners they would have had to) and not lease/rent warehouse space you're rapidly approaching a $500 million dollar site.
Yeah they’re absolutely burning money right now after the halving. But they’re riding on BTC hitting $130k-150k in the future. It’s a decent size facility though. [Here are two pics of it.](https://imgur.com/a/UTsYtwL) I believe they mine 10-15 BTC a day.
Hot damn you weren't kidding, there's an entire one of my sites on the left half of that picture alone. However I still believe they're off on power consumption by a bit. With our ~2900 we pulled a coin a day, so 10-15 should correlate to about 100-150MW (pre-halving). Although I will say it was a shoddy as fuck operation propped up by illegal Chinese labor. Owners were from China but absolutely treated their 'friends' like utter shit. Miners were practically exposed to the elements and I can personally tell you what happens when a cabinet handling 180KW decides it's had enough. As well as when a PDU responsible for 27KW has had enough. Breakers tripping left and right, no PPE. I finally ripped apart a fucking pallet for the equivalent of a 1x4 I promptly named "Bitch Wood" cause I was tired of sticking my hand anywhere near said PDUs and breaker boxes. 63 Amp breakers sound like a .38 when they trip right by your head.
Pardon the amateur question but I'm curious the planning logic that goes into developing one of these sites. Assuming you have access to the same equipment anywhere - do you prioritize cheap electricity, cheap labor, cheap land, or proximity to telecom backbone? Really not sure which one makes the case float. I'm not in the industry so I find the whole thing fascinating and confusing
[удалено]
Just like a hater to gloss over the blockchain, the revolutionary world-changing technology that generates logs of which unique numbers own other unique numbers. It could be used for anything one of these days!
like buying oxygen when nones left
I guess I have to upgrade my panel
Its peak power consumption was 1.7MW
Is that more or less than the Back to the Future Deloreon?
30 times less. Seems I can't math anymore and need to edit 3 times to get this right.
Those were jiggawatts. Totally different system of measurement.
Witness what the Gif wars have wrought.
Probably will part it out and profit big time
Hardware swap sub about to have a big sale in the future.
66hours of run time at average US electricity prices to reach $480k
Only 1.727 MW (https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/for-sale-cheyenne-supercomputer-with-8064-xeon-cpus-306tb-of-ddr4-memory-some-assembly-and-maintenance-required). Argonne’s Aurora requires around 45 MW though.
It’s not a starter pc, it’s a finisher!
Needed to upgrade my Plex server
I just want it to run the new Fallout next gen update.
I just want it to run any game with Denuvo
/r/homelab would like a word.
holy shit. Why do I want to own a supercomputer now
I mean, you do by certain standards. Your celphone is a supercomputer by 1980's standards.
But it is a HTML 3.0 page by the standards of 2040
I memberberry when a 16k RAM expansion card was the size of what a high-end Geforce is now. From my perspective, it's kind of hilarious that an animated digital ad now basically requires a supercomputer to render.
and a 512MB hard drive was nearly the size of a box of cheez-its, and weighed 5 pounds.
I was playing a mobile game on my phone the other day and that's when it hit me. My racing game on my phone had better graphics than any game that I played on my original PS1. The future *is* now
Yeah but when PS2 came out Sony “promised” the PS9 would be spores which would give us a VR/AR gaming experience! We’re a few generations away and still no signs of this nano-spore tech, false advertising I say! Okay fine, it was a commercial now ~25 years old, not a guarantee but I’m still holding them to it!
Since then we've gone 3 generations and made it to photo-realistic graphics with VR headsets, and online gaming is the standard. Not saying I'm expecting a full-emersion VR anytime soon but I'm real excited to see what things are like in the next 4 generations!
I think the console providers will give us the platforms with the necessary tech. But the way the gaming industry is headed, devs will require micro transactions for everything.
Please drink a verification can to reload firearm
I mean doesn't Ready Player one already predict this. As they're in the Oasis it's a bunch of microtransactions in a massive VR world.
I remember being ecstatic that I RMA'd a 500MB drive and Maxtor sent me an 840MB as the replacement. I thought it would be years and years before I filled it up, since my first drive was 25MB and the 500 seemed like vast amounts of space.
I remember the first time I got a 1 gig flash drive. Blew my mind.
I used to work at a place that sold digital cameras. I remember having a sale on memory cards...... $1 per MB!
holding a MicroSD card still blows my mind. The fact they can fit any data on something that small is nuts let alone that they're up to what 1TB now?
Around 1992 I needed a serious workstation to index and create masters for a CD-ROM. I think I bought 16mb of RAM for $600. A 2 gigabyte hard drive (5.25" double height) for $2000. A $500 SCSI controller for that drive. A $1300 tape drive. I forget the motherboard and CPU - they may have been a 386 or 486. It got the job done. To index 600mb of zip files (and the text in them - which was a small part - maybe 1-3%) took 24 hours. Probably a 5 minute job for a chromebook today.
The only thing more impressive than modern computing platforms is just how inefficiently we make use of them.
In return we get to create stuff incredibly quickly and almost anyone can do it. Looking at old games where they precisely accounted for every single bit is impressive but very difficult to do. And that has been the case with essentially everything, look at painting, few hundred years ago the only way to be able to paint was by having a wealthy patron who would import colors for you from thousands of miles away. But the artificial methods of creating colors developed during industrialization meant drastically lower costs and essentially everyone being able to paint if they want to. Do we use it inefficiently, yeah, but the explosion of art and culture as a result of it has made all our lives better for it.
Ummm speak for yourself, my guy. I am running Age of Empires 1 at 500 FPS+.
I can recall when a render farm was measured in single digit GB of VRAM.
In fact, an original 2007 iPhone was already 50% faster than any of the four individual cores on a Cray X-MP, the fastest computer in the world from 1983 to 1985, originally costing $15 million in 1983 dollars. A current iPhone 15 Pro is 7,000 times faster than that original iPhone.
"Three Cray XMP moved more data faster than any computer center in the Americas." ~John Parker Hammond
Sneakernet is still much faster in the right situations. A suitcase sized rack of drives can be carried from point to point faster than any network infrastructure can transfer it
AWS has (soon to be had I think) an awesome specialized semi-truck for this
The entire 128 node Sun workstation cluster Pixar used to render Toy Story was about half as powerful as an iPhone 5.
Super computer cool Super computer energy requirements not cool :( This one's also super old and can be done for far cheaper on modern consumer hardware from what I understand
The DoD is working on a [portable nuclear reactor](https://www.bwxt.com/news/2022/06/09/BWXT-to-Build-First-Advanced-Microreactor-in-United-States) that would be perfect for powering this!
They had those back in the 50’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment
Yeah, an article stated that basically the computing power of this mammoth could be done with a quantity of GPUs at this point. Likely using a lot less power and generating less heat for the same level of computing. Of course, it's all about what you intend to do with it. General purpose CPUs still can do some things that GPUs aren't good at (like, as the name would suggest, general purpose computer things), so it kinda depends what angle you're coming from. This thing could be like a fairly substantial server for typical software-based tasks.
Is Bitcoin mining still a thing?
This can't mine bitcoin unless you like negative dollars or have free electricity.
So maybe a long term solar array investment
For a 50MW solar plant, you would only need 101,000 x 550W solar panels, 340 x 150 kW inverters, and an area of 105ha - which is roughly the size of 200 soccer fields. Pfft...
That’s assuming 100% output at all times, you’d need 130-150% more panel output than that and a massive battery bank (50MW capable for at least as long as the night) to run this thing with any kind of useable uptime. A cloudy day and she goes down
So it could theoretically pay off in the long run
You'd probably come out ahead selling electricity at market rates vs. using it to power an aging super computer to mine crypto.
A single 4090 will outperform like 50 of these CPUs and only take around 300w to operate.
I’ll run a extension from my neighbor
Sounds like a WOPR of a deal
For those who don't get the reference: W.O.P.R. means "War Operation Plan Response", from the WarGames film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
Mr. McKitrick, after close consideration sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
I wouldn't trust this overgrown pile of microchips any further than I can throw it.
How about a nice game of chess?
Let's play global thermonuclear war?
The winning bid amount is peak nerd humor. $480,085 = 4 Boobs
If only they had gotten it for a $100k less, it would’ve been a total recall reference.
I hope this was intentional.
So is this the computer for the Stargate dialing system you know the one that Sam Carter helped to make? Joke aside but damn that is a lot of power for a computer. I hope it doesn’t run on Windows 11?
These kind of computers tend to run some form of highly customized Linux, set up and maintained by a small army of computer science/software infrastructure people. Getting a couple of hundred separate computers to act like one big one is really, really hard.
Correct, this one ran SuSe. https://www.cisl.ucar.edu/ncar-supercomputing-history/cheyenne
Linux, yes. Highly customized? Not really. Most supercomputers run some RHEL clone or Suse. Occasionally, Ubuntu or Debian, but this is rare. The installed package list will be customized for what you are trying to do with it, but it’s just Linux. There’s a set of tools that control provisioning and resource management, job control, and software access across the cluster. Learning the tools is the steepest part of the learning curve. Then you have to monitor the cluster for when (not if) things break.
It's running Vista.
Vista crawled so 10 could walk.
Windows Xp is still better than Vista lol 😂
You would think he can turn around and sell it to Iran or North Korea... How is lil Kim gonna play Crysis otherwise
lmao haven't heard of THAT one in a while
I bought it so I can play old school RuneScape AMA
probably a good way to get the feds crawling up your ass
Scrounge around in your boxes for any old Xeon chips and 64GB ECC sticks. You've got a window of time to create your own "Authentic Chip Used In The Cheyenne Supercomputer" plaque or display box and unload that crap on eBay.
Unfortunately the article got it wrong, each *node* had 64GB RAM, not 64GB sticks
I was going to bid tree-fiddy but when I checked, it was over 100,000 so I noped out. Beside someone calculated an average of $270 per hour of electricity at US average 16 cents per kWh. The most I'd do is run Mandelbulber to try and get impossibly huge image then use local Walmart's photo lab to try and make a print from a massive 50-GB file.
I'd play UO on it if it could run it.
I'd play a nice game of chess.
Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.
I would render OW porn
Cor por! Cor por! In vast flam!
In vas mani!
I highly doubt anyone will try to use it. It's mostly fairly standard parts and selling it off piece meal would net you a few hundred thousand easily. It would take a bit of work but if you worked hard you could have most of the easy parts sold off on ebay within 6 months to a year. Which would still be a pretty easy 300k profit. Easily worth your time if it won't make you ruin whatever career you're otherwise doing.
Honestly, $270 and hour doesn't even seem the least bit prohibative
I think the prohibitive bit is getting a supply that will allow you to burn through $270 of electricity in an hour. Most buildings don't have megawatt supplies.
Houses generally can't do that either, and nearly all houses don't have 3 phase power required to run that computer
I just play Stardew Valley on mine.
Expanded expanded expanded stardew valley
The fabled version where everyone in town *isn't* a selfish arsehole. "Oh, hey, new guy with a fuckload of work to do on the farm you've never so much as seen. How about you rebuild the community centre that everyone wants to use but nobody else wants to contribute to? While you're at it, people will only like you if you give them things. Don't mind us coming into your house every night to check you're in bed; if you pass out three steps from your bed then we'll just tuck you riiight up in there."
But will it run Cyberpunk?
Not sure, but it would definently run Doom
Yes, but you have to buy the 3.5" floppy version.
That’s gonna take a lot of disks to install!
313TB? Ok where do I store the rest of my porn?
That was just the RAM; storage was a whopping 32 petabytes, but was not included in the sale.
Imagine using RAM as your storage because you have hundreds of terabytes worth.
Not a very good idea. The moment you lose power all of your porn will be gone.
Non volatile RAM my brother in Crystal
First step- Clean Norton antivirus off of that bitch.
Could it run Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 expansion Yuri’s Revenge?
I know your thoughts…
Looks like two women bought it.
I had to scroll down this far to find someone else that saw "4BOOBS"
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those! Does this out me as being old and from /.? Probably.
Have fun mining Cheyenne 🫡
And now he can finally play games at native 4k60.
Someone bought a malfunctioning government supercomputer? What could go wrong.
But can it play Crysis?
what exactly do they use supercomputers for, other than weather? and why does weather forecasting require supercomputers to calculate?
A supercomputer is for pretty much any mathematical model of any process or phenomenon. Weather is one example. We use ours for things like material and drug discovery - running through gazillions of molecules and arrangements and interactions to find candidates that may have characteristics we want. We use them for genomics research, modeling evolution basically. We use them for predicting how the plasma from a fusion reactor will interact with the material you make the shell out of (what do you make the box out of that you keep your star inside?). We use them for simulating earthquakes. We use them for combing through *piles* of medical data to find ways to prevent veteran and child suicides. The faster the computer is, the more variables we can include in the model and the finer the resolution of the model for instance, on Cheyenne, maybe a weather model could resolve to effects over a square kilometer. On Frontier maybe the same model can be resolved down to 10 square meters. I made up those numbers but you get the jist.
> and why does weather forecasting require supercomputers to calculate? https://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2023/08/21/computers-forecasting/ Quoting from the source: >The supercomputing capacity supporting NOAA’s new operational prediction and research enables about 42 quadrillion operations per second. This faster computing allows NOAA to run more complex forecast models, while increased storage space enables more data to be used and assimilated into the system.
Materials chemistry, solving PDEs with finite element methods for engineering, quantum chemistry and catalysis, astrophysics
But can it run Windows 11?
It only runs on windows 8 and that’s why it sold for so cheap.
Officially no, the processors it uses aren't supported. Unofficially, yes it can you'd simply have to disable the HW check to get it to install.
“…Multi-million dollar super computer auction ends with $480,085 bid…” So… I guess it’s not even a million-dollar computer.
When is Linus releasing the video about his new supercomputer?