Ian Cutress recently did a video on the topic here (I think he changed the title to reflect the end price of the auction), which does a bit of a breakdown. You for example also have to add shipping costs (from a certified company) to the price.
Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it. Goes to show how far technology has come.
I guess if everything sells you might make profit, but then it also comes with a lot of hassle and risk. And for actually using it, I imagine that electricity cost would be a huge factor.
Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.
Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it’s not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn’t make sense.
You also have to consider that the downtime’s going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you’re going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.
I mean there definitely are some valuable metals in there, but I can’t imagine that this is a competitive price to pay for them, especially since extraction wouldn’t be easy. And some parts do have value, even if it ends up being the case that running the full cluster isn’t economic anymore.
I do wonder who at this point could use all those processors (and Mainboards), but the ram might still be reasonable to use, maybe the cables, the cabinets themselves too. And I think the video also mentions that there are two managing servers. Those might be most likely to actually be useful for their original purpose.
It’s likely not worth using, maybe splitting the nodes out individually for colleges to use for research projects for a few years. The cabinets are probably worth something because of the graphics on them. The power consumption, lack of the high speed storage, and large scale industrial cooling system make it impractical to use. You would probably need an entire power substation in order to run it. You could probably install it at an industrial site, but you would still need to come up with networking and installation, which could cost more than what you paid for the thing in the first place.
I mean, even if some company has a practical need for it, or even just wanted to sell compute time on it, it wouldn’t be worth it due to the operating and installation costs. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me to see individual nodes from this poping up on /r/homelab, those guys are nuts.
Is that a good deal? I mean, it says “multi-million” and then it sells for less than 1/2 million, so I’m guessing good deal.
IDK, part it out on eBay?
Theres a non-zero chance that Linus Sebastian just did something really dumb. LoL.
If someone doesn’t know that person by name, here is a picture of him:
In case anyone confuses him with Linus Torvalds:
Ian Cutress recently did a video on the topic here (I think he changed the title to reflect the end price of the auction), which does a bit of a breakdown. You for example also have to add shipping costs (from a certified company) to the price.
Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it. Goes to show how far technology has come.
I guess if everything sells you might make profit, but then it also comes with a lot of hassle and risk. And for actually using it, I imagine that electricity cost would be a huge factor.
Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it’s not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn’t make sense.
You also have to consider that the downtime’s going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you’re going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.
If that’s too much, there’s always the home brew option: https://www.zdnet.com/article/build-your-own-supercomputer-out-of-raspberry-pi-boards/
What about the metal costs? Is this thing worth at this price for disassembly and salvaging?
I mean there definitely are some valuable metals in there, but I can’t imagine that this is a competitive price to pay for them, especially since extraction wouldn’t be easy. And some parts do have value, even if it ends up being the case that running the full cluster isn’t economic anymore.
I do wonder who at this point could use all those processors (and Mainboards), but the ram might still be reasonable to use, maybe the cables, the cabinets themselves too. And I think the video also mentions that there are two managing servers. Those might be most likely to actually be useful for their original purpose.
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It’s likely not worth using, maybe splitting the nodes out individually for colleges to use for research projects for a few years. The cabinets are probably worth something because of the graphics on them. The power consumption, lack of the high speed storage, and large scale industrial cooling system make it impractical to use. You would probably need an entire power substation in order to run it. You could probably install it at an industrial site, but you would still need to come up with networking and installation, which could cost more than what you paid for the thing in the first place.
Don’t think anyone thinks a hobbyist would be buying this thing.
I mean, even if some company has a practical need for it, or even just wanted to sell compute time on it, it wouldn’t be worth it due to the operating and installation costs. Although, it wouldn’t surprise me to see individual nodes from this poping up on /r/homelab, those guys are nuts.
So what’s the point in buying it?