Winner looking at his electricity bill:
this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Hey, I have worked on this exact machine before, neat to see they are finally decommissioning it. It would be a terrible purchase to actually use these days though, for the cost of moving and deploying it you could rock a few Hopper or Grace clusters that would outperform the cluster for less than half of the operating overhead.
I fully expect it to get parted out, the actual components would be far more useful on their own as cheap homelab systems, and would be a much better ROI versus using it as is. This thing is water cooled, just the plumbing would be a nightmare to deal with if you aren't set up for it, and if you are you would be better off going with a modern architecture anyway.
What were you using it for?
We were running meteorological models mostly, but I did have a colleague that was trying to use it to predict wildlife migratory patterns using topographical mapping. It was batched out on a few projects at any given time while I was there, it was essentially timeshares between a few different research departments.
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Power consumption: 1.7 MW
I hope it stays decommissioned. We're burning up the planet too fast already, and old computers tend to be far less efficient than modern ones.
Pop up a solar farm and you are good to go, baby!
Yeah just need 10Mw+ of solar and like 40mwh of batteries to power it 24/7
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The specs seem to be just enough to run a Minecraft server that doesn't freeze when one player explores new chunks.
no use, minecraft server is single threaded. it won't hit 20TPS in an even slightly complex world no matter how much compute you throw at it
Yeah but you can put the whole world on RAM disk.
Damn that’s crazy. When I was just out of college I built the touchscreen web app that promoted this thing in the lobby of UCAR. Looks like it’s still running for now: https://hpctv.ucar.edu
That is a really cool resume item, ngl
Do you mind me asking the languages/frameworks backing it? (e.g. JavaScript/Node)
Thanks! It was a Python backend that the data science team at UCAR built and a Vue.js front end.
Neat application. Looks fun :D
The price will only be exceeded by the power bill for the electricity needed to run it.
This thing is basically the size of my apartment.
Which means I have room! How much?
Currently around $51k, reserve not yet met. Buyer responsible for transportation and cabling not included, fyi.
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Who wants to go in with me on this?
New Lemmy server?
Let's turn it into a Lemmy server.
Killing a fly with canon there, aren’t you?
Building a cannon to shoot for the moon
I hope Matthew Broderick buys it.
And then programs it to play a nice game of chess
Seems like it's cheap to start the bidding at $2500 but the cheapest thing is probably the initial purchase price after moving it, buying the needed cabling, and electricity bills.
I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.
Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn't as specialized as I expected.
It may be running SLED, but just imagine all the specialized, tweaked af code running on top. They didn’t just pop in a LiveCD and click “Install”.
No, they probably had to pop the live CD into each node individually and click "instal". Then run a script on each one to join it to the cluster.
Kind of, you would use a deployment node to manage the individual blades, they are running really specialized software that is basically useless without the management nodes. It wouldn't be difficult to spin it up (Terascale would have it ready to batch out jobs within a few hours) but you are going to need to engineer your building around it to even get that far. Your foundation needs to support multiple tons of weight, be perfectly level, be able to deliver megawatts of power, remove megawatts of heat (it is water cooled, so you need to have infrastructure and cooling towers to handle that), and you need to be able to get it into the building to begin with. I have worked on this system a few times, just moving it would literally cost upwards of 7 figures. The computer is pretty easy to use, it's all of the supporting infrastructure that will need a literal team of engineers. I could (and have, kind of) spin the machine up to start crunching data within a day on my own. Fuck moving it, and double fuck re-cabling it. Literal miles of fiber in those racks.
You do literally pop in an image that is pre-configured in and it deploys to everything at once. That's probably the easiest part of the whole setup.
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They didn’t just pop in a LiveCD and click “Install”.
Obviously not. In 2017, they would have used a live USB thumbdrive instead of a CD.
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Whoever buys it will most likely just part it out and sell it on ebay.
It's all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there's 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc... I think you'd have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.
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It's kind of lame that they need to junk the entire apparatus after only a decade. I get that processor technology moves on apace but we already know it does that so why doesn't a universal architecture exist where nodes can be added at will?
It's more of an operating cost issue. It's almost decade-old hardware. It was efficient in its day, but compared to new hardware it just costs so much to run you would be better served investing in something with modern efficiency. It won't be junked, it will be parted out. If you are someone that wants a cheap homelab with infiniband and shitloads of memory you could pick up a blade for a fraction of what it would otherwise cost. I fully expect it to turn into thousands of reasonably powerful servers for the prosumer and nerd markets instead of running as a monolithic cluster.
A decade is a lifetime in technology. Moore's law had just ended when this was put together.
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If you have too many "slow" modes in a super computer you'll hit a performance ceiling where everything is bottle necked by the speed of things that are not the CPU: memory, disk for swap, and network for sending partial results across nodes for further partial computing.
Source: I've hang up too much around people doing PhD thesis in these kinds of problems.
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Can it run Doom?
No. But it will run NetBSD 😇
I'm guessing that it can run multiplayer Doom with ray tracing turned on.
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I upvoted cause obligatory joke but there is a map that has like 100k enemies in it, I would like to try it out.
Please don't let crypto bros touch this
No need to worry, it'll have a terrible hash rate.
Just might be powerful enough for SolidWorks not to crash
Not if you're running Monte Carlo
TIL that Silicon Graphics still exists...
It doesn't. Bought by hpe.
Let's just hope that it isn't bought up by Bitcoin miners . . .
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