Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

https://gsaauctions.gov/auctions/preview/282996

by zrules • 2 years ago

261 155 2 years ago

gsaauctions.gov

bketelsen• 2 years ago

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

Sorry I couldn't resist.

Isamu2• 2 years ago

You forgot to say First Post!

Isamu2• 2 years ago

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 having 128GB per node, totaling 313,344 GB

Topology: EDR Enhanced Hypercube

IB Switches: 224 units

Moving this system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company. Please note the four (4) attached documents detailing the facility requirements and specifications will be provided. Due to their considerable weight, the racks require experienced movers equipped with proper Professional Protection Equipment (PPE) to ensure safe handling. The purchaser assumes responsibility for transferring the racks from the facility onto trucks using their equipment.

chasil2• 2 years ago

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.

michaelt2• 2 years ago

So getting 8,064 of them for $3,085 - 38 cents per CPU - is great value for money!

Locutus_• 2 years ago

There is, but really only for the MIPS hardware.

mk_stjames3• 2 years ago

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 seems each motehrboard is a dual CPU board and so there are 4032 nodes, but the nodes are in blades that likely need their rack for power. But I think individual cabinets would be cool to own.

There are 144 nodes per cabinet... so 28 cabinets. I'd pay a fair amount just to own a cabinet to stick in my garage if I was near there.

chasil2• 2 years ago

These are blades, so there is probably some kind of container chassis required to run them.

Using them as desktop PCs would likely be a challenge.

electroly• 2 years ago

The individual servers are not watercooled. The compute racks are air-cooled; the adjacent cooling racks then exchange that heat using the building's chilled water. It's the rack as a whole that is watercooled. If you extract a single node, you won't get any of that. As the other commenters also point out, these are blades; you can't run an individual node by itself.

fnord772• 2 years ago

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.

slavik812• 2 years ago

I have a couple servers with this exact CPU that I run for a mixture of practical and sentimental reasons. I bought them off eBay and only after purchase discovered they were a piece of history. They have a second life testing GPU libraries for Debian from a rack in my basement.

For privacy reasons, I won't say who originally owned the servers, but they had a cool custom paint job and were labelled YETI1 and YETI2. If the original owner is on HN, perhaps they will recognize the machines and provide more information.

https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra.jpg https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra-open.jpg

unnouinceput• 2 years ago

...totaling 313,344 GB

Can you imagine the RAMDisk? Yes, you can. Especially in 20 years when it will be the norm. And also the Windows version that will require half of it in order to run /s

christkv• 2 years ago

Does it come with a portable nuclear reactor to power it?

CalRobert• 2 years ago

Is it not "Personal" protective equipment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_protective_equipment

op00to• 2 years ago

You need PPE to protect your profession of moving stuff.

araes2• 2 years ago

If somebody has the money, and the resources required to house the system, seems like decent value for the money at the reserve (apparently $100k) The range of, I'd buy if I had the money and a valid use case. Even partial resale like suggested. There's an argument about being behind the "most" advanced. Yet, its a petascale server from 2016 that was good enough for the NSF. It's not exactly an old dog.

The stuff I could quickly find was $1M+ in individual sales (not sure about auction sites and used).

DDR4 RAM $734,500 @ $75 / 32 GB for 313,344 GB

CPUs $484,000 @ $60 / (1) E5-2697v4 for 8,064 units

Figure the hard drives must also be enormous, and probably a huge amount of storage, just not sure on the quantity, and they may not be sold with the system.

They're not kidding on the moving company, that's 10's of tons of computer to haul somewhere. 26 1U Servers @ 2500 lbs each. Couple semi-trucks, since the most they can usually do is 44,000 lbs on US highways. Not sure if the E-Cell weight was 14 @ 1500 lbs in addition to the 26 @ 2500 lbs?

araes2• 2 years ago

Apparently it ended up selling for the cost of the CPUs at $480,000. Also, guess my math was low, and it was a 47 ton computer.

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/05/07/cheyenne-supercomput...

queuebert• 2 years ago

I wonder who buys these. Crypto miners? My institution would make it nearly impossible to buy a secondhand supercomputer.

h2odragon3• 2 years ago

Recyclers.

sambull• 2 years ago

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.

bragr• 2 years ago

There's a whole sub-industry of people bidding on government auctions in order to part out the stuff. I'd be pretty surprised if the whole cluster got reassembled. But people on a budget will buy those compute nodes, someone trying to keep their legacy IB network will snap up those switches, the racks, etc.

gabrielhidasy• 2 years ago

r/homelab will have a field-day getting those nodes up, some people will want just one for practicality, some people will want at least a couple and a IB switch just for the novelty of it.

lawlessone• 2 years ago

Crypto miners?

I think mining crypto with these would burn far too much energy compared to the ASICS in use.

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

Not every crypto can be mined with ASICs. For example, Monero is ASIC and GPU resistant.

latchkey8• 2 years ago

Crypto is no longer mined commercially with GPU type compute. When ETH switched to PoS, it decimated the entire GPU mining industry. It is no longer profitable. The only people doing it now are hobbyists.

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

Some crypto is ASIC- and GPU-resistant.

Monero is one of them.

jfkfif• 2 years ago

Academic departments with low budgets and cheap electricity who can make due with old CPUs

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

I wonder what the point of liquid cooling such a system was. Were they pressed for space?

Galatians4_16• 2 years ago

Built in a bunker under a mountain, so reduced airflow, plus need to hide heat signatures from outside surveillance?

Also, likely they had infrastructure available, from the nuclear power they use.

eptcyka• 2 years ago

Doesn't matter what conductor you use to move heat, the same amount of energy will have to be dispersed. And watercooling just implies more intermediate steps between the heatshield of the die and air. So I don't believe the heat signatures can really be helped.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

This is a weather supercomputer, not a defense one.

kimmeld• 2 years ago

Cheyenne Wyoming not Cheyenne mountain.

calaphos• 2 years ago

Has been really common in HPC for quite a while. I presume the higher interconnect/network of hpc favour the higher density of liquid cooling. Hardware utilization is also higher compared to normal datacenters, so the additional efficiency vs air cooling is more useful.

convolvatron• 2 years ago

for large machines the air setup is really less efficient and takes up alot of space. you end up building a big room with a pressurized floor which is completely ringed by large ac units. you have to move alot of air through the floor bringing it up through the cabinets and back through to the acs. its also a big control systems problem, you need to get the air through the cabinets evenly, so you need variable speed fans or controlled ducts..and those need to be adaptive but not oscillate.

with a water cooled setup you can move alot more heat through your pipes just be increasing flow rate. so you need pumps instead of fans. and now your machine room isn't a mini-hurricane, and you can more flexibly deal with the waste heat.

michaelt2• 2 years ago

The heat's going to be leaving the building in liquid-filled pipes, however you architect it. And with 1.7MW of peak power consumption, a nontrivial amount of liquid.

It's just a question of whether you want to add air and refrigerant into the mix.

It seems they're decommissioning it partly due to "faulty quick disconnects causing water spray" though, so an air cooling stage would have had its benefits...

toast03• 2 years ago

The heat's going to be leaving the building in liquid-filled pipes

In the right climate, and the right power density, you can use outside air for cooling, at least part of the time. Unlikely at this scale of machine, but there was a lot of work towards datacenter siting in the 2010s to find places were ambient cooling would significantly reduce the power needed to operate.

h2odragon3• 2 years ago

the system is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray. Given the expense and downtime associated with rectifying this issue in the last six months of operation, it's deemed more detrimental than the anticipated failure rate of compute nodes.

Even the RAM has aged out...

Very hard to justify running any of this; newer kit pays for itself in reduced power and maintenance quick in comparison.

Tempest1981• 2 years ago

Are you trying to discourage others from bidding, so you can swoop in and win the auction?

h2odragon3• 2 years ago

nah, i already have far more junk computers than i need.

I lusted after a Cray T3E once that I coulda had for $1k and trucking it across TN and NC; but even then I couldn't have run it. I'm two miles away from 3 phase power and even then couldn't have justified the power budget. At the time a slightly less scrap UltraSPARC 6k beat it up on running costs even with higher initial costs so i went with that instead. I did find a bunch of Alphas to do the byte swizzling tho. Ex "Titanic" render farm nodes.

I've been away from needing low budget big compute for a while, but having spent a few years watching the space i still can't help but go "ooo neat" and wonder what i could do with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_T3E

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

Is this what they used to run the stargate?

monocasa2• 2 years ago

This is from Cheyenne, Wyoming, not Cheyenne Mountain (in Colorado Springs).

brianhorakh• 2 years ago

This is Wopr! How about a nice game of chess?

bibliotekka• 2 years ago

the only winning move is not to play

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

For 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.

observationist2• 2 years ago

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.)

martinpw• 2 years ago

The supercomputer flops are FP64. The A100 stats you are using are FP16.

mk_stjames3• 2 years ago

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.

Netcob• 2 years ago

Aw man... I was going to use it for my homelab but that's 1696320W more than I can supply. Well... maybe if I use two plugs instead of one...

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

Bet it runs warm. The cat will love sitting on it.

buescher• 2 years ago

It was at #160 in 2023 when it was decommissioned.

seaourfreed• 2 years ago

The only problem is that the super computer keeps outputing "WANT TO PLAY A GAME?"

simonerlic• 2 years ago

A strange game; the only winning move is not to play

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Hence my simple theory of aesthetics:

— if the best stuff from then is still better than good stuff from now, it's art

— if the best stuff from then is worse than bad stuff from now, it's technology

kibwen• 2 years ago

May I present my postmodern theory of aesthetics:

- If it's useful as a medium for money laundering, it's art.

- If it's useful as a facilitator for money laundering, it's technology.

voytec• 2 years ago

It took us fifteen years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a system for the gate on Earth

    Samantha Carter

isodev• 2 years ago

I was just thinking how much of deep space radio telemetry this super computer must have seen.

techplex• 2 years ago

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxiL2_knQQyrYUenU0PCCcZZpzfQwCq6L...

monocasa2• 2 years ago

It'd be great if this could end up in the hands of some group like the Living Computers Museum.

pnw• 2 years ago

Unfortunately LCM closed during the pandemic and laid off all their staff, with no sign of reopening.

neilv2• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_(supercomputer)

The Cheyenne supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming began operation as one of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computers. Ranked in November 2016 as the 20th most powerful computer in the world[1] by Top500, the 5.34-petaflops system[2] is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing[3] performed by NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient[4] than Yellowstone, with a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.[5]

neilv2• 2 years ago

Hard to see in the low-res photos, but is that storage from Supermicro?

humansareok13• 2 years ago

What's this thing actually worth? Current bid is ~3k.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 2 years ago

Hang around for the winning bid and you'll see what it's worth then.

humansareok13• 2 years ago

Auctions by default almost always undercut the actual market value so no not really?

freedomben• 2 years ago

Remember that the buyer has to move it. If that costs $50K (no idea, totally guessing) then it's currently "worth" $53K

hggh• 2 years ago

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20240429122132/https://gsaauctio...

nickpsecurity3• 2 years ago

My 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.

formerly_proven• 2 years ago

Cray XT/SeaStar? iirc the interconnect ASIC pretends to be another peer CPU connected via HyperTransport. HPE Flex is similar, but works via QPI/UPI for Intel CPUs.

nickpsecurity3• 2 years ago

It was NUMAscale. It’s mentioned in this article with some others for comparison:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/07/16/what-if-numa-scaling...

haunter• 2 years ago

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.

ansible2• 2 years ago

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.

jeremyjh2• 2 years ago

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

bombcar5• 2 years ago

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.

freetime2• 2 years ago

a price in mind they are not willing to go below

I worked for an auction, and sellers accepted bids below the reserve price all the time. They just want to avoid a situation where an item sells at a “below market” price due to not having enough bidders in attendance - e.g. a single bidder is able to win the auction with a single lowball bid. If they see healthy bidding activity that’s often sufficient to convince them to part with the item below reserve.

Reserve prices are annoying for buyers, but below-reserve bids can provide really useful feedback for sellers.

We even had full-time staff whose job was to contact sellers after the auction ended and try to convince them to accept a below-reserve bid, or try to get the buyer and seller to meet somewhere in the middle. This worked frequently enough to make this the highest ROI group in our call center.

fnord772• 2 years ago

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?

bufferoverflow4• 2 years ago

You won't find 8064 buyers of these CPUs any time soon. It will take many years, maybe a decade to offload.

For example, in April ebay sold 79 of them. You're looking at ~100 months. And that's assuming constant demand.

ceinewydd2• 2 years ago

I ended up reading all the documentation provided alongside the auction because I was debating making a bid. I decided not to in the end.

In total, Cheyenne weighs in around ~95000lbs in weight, they require it be broken down in <= 3 business days on site and only offer 8AM - 4PM access. Therefore you'll need to support unbolting and palletizing all the cabinets for loading into a dry trailer, get a truck to show up, load, then FTL to the storage (or reinstall) location of your choosing for whatever's next.

Requirements for getting facility access seem to mean you bring both labor and any/all specialized equipment including protective equipment to not damage their floors while hauling away those 2400lb racks. Liability insurance of $1-2M across a wide range of categories (this isn't particularly unusual, or expensive, but it does mean you can't just show up with some mates and a truck you rented at Home Depot).

I'd guess you're looking at more like $25k just to move Cheyenne via truck, plus whatever it sells for at auction, unless you are located almost next door to them in Wyoming. Going from WY to WA the FTL costs alone would be $6-7k USD just for the freight cost (driver, dry trailer and fuel surcharges), add a bit if your destination doesn't have a loading dock and needs transloading for the last mile to >1 truck (probably) equipped with a tail lift. All the rest is finding a local contractor with semi-skilled labor and equipment to break it down and get it ready to load on a truck and covering the "job insurance".

Warehouse costs if you're breaking it for parts won't be trivial either and you'd be flooding the used market (unfavorably to you) were you to list 8000 CPUs or 300TB DDR4; it could take months or even to clear the parts without selling at a substantially depressed price.

It will take probably several thousand hours in labor to break this for parts assuming you need to sell them "Tested and Working" to achieve the $50/CPU unit pricing another commenter noticed on eBay, and "Untested; Sold as Seen" won't get anywhere near the same $/unit (for CPUs, DRAM, or anything else) and so even assuming $25/hr for fully burdened relatively unskilled labor, you could well be talking up to $100k in labor to break, test and list Cheyenne's guts on eBay or even sell onward in lots to other recyclers / used parts resellers. I don't think I could even find $25/hr labor in WA capable and willing of undertaking this work, I fear it'd be more like $45-60/hr in this market in 2024 (and this alone makes the idea of bidding unviable).

A lot of the components like the Cooling Distribution Units are, in my opinion, worth little more than scrap metal unless you're really going to try and make Cheyenne live again (which makes no sense, it's a 1.7MW supercomputer costing thousands of dollars per day to power, and which has similar TFLOPs to something needing 100x less power if you'd bought 2024-era hardware instead).

Anything you ultimately can't sell as parts or shift as scrap metal you are potentially going to have to junk (at cost) or send to specialist electronics recycling (at cost); your obligations here are going to vary by location and this could also be expensive -- the leftovers.

If anyone does take the plunge, please do write up your experiences!

bastardoperator• 2 years ago

Donate it to https://computerhistory.org/, assuming they want it.

tombert• 2 years ago

Man, if I had the space, the money, and the means of powering it I would bid on this immediately. It's so damn cool and will likely end up selling for a lot less than its worth due to its size.

I've always been fascinated by the supercomputer space, in no small part because I've been sadly somewhat removed from it; the SGI and Cray machines are a bit before my time, but I've always looked back in wonder, thinking of how cool they might have been to play with back in the 80s and 90s.

The closest I get to that now is occasionally getting to spin up some kind of HPC cluster on a cloud provider, which is fun in its own right, but I don't know, there's just something insanely cool about the giant racks of servers whose sole purpose is to crunch numbers [1].

[1] To the pendants, I know all computers' job is to crunch numbers in some capacity, but a lot of computers and their respective operating systems like to pretend that they don't.

Animats• 2 years ago

It's really hard to find a home for large, old, high-maintenance technology. What do you do with a locomotive, or a Linotype? They need a support facility and staff to be more than scrap. So they're really cheap when available.

The Pacific Locomotive Association is an organization with that problem. About 20 locomotives, stored at Brightside near Sunol. They've been able to get about half of them working. It's all volunteer. Jobs that took days in major shops take years in a volunteer operation.

jasonwatkinspdx3• 2 years ago

At the ill fated Portland TechShop I took woodworking classes from a retired gentleman, who professionally was a pattern maker for molding cast metal parts. This made his approach to woodworking really interesting. He had a huge array of freestanding sander machines, including a disc sander with more than a yard diameter.

For anyone unfamiliar, pattern makers would make wooden model versions of parts that were to be cast in metal. The pattern would be used to make the mold. He could use these various sanding machines to get 1/64" precision for complex geometries. It was fascinating to watch how he approached things, especially in comparison to modern CNC.

His major project outside of teaching the classes? Making patterns for a local steam locomotive restoration project. He had all these wooden versions of various parts of a locomotive sitting around.

dekhn6• 2 years ago

Does 1/64" precision really mean anything in wood, where small fluctuations in air moisture can cause > 1/64" distortion? I guess it's OK if you stay within a climate controlled area.

guenthert• 2 years ago

Funny, just yesterday I saw here in Germany a train where the locomotive was labeled 'rent me'. Apparently there's an organization which bought old locomotives (this particular one looked like 60s, maybe early 70s vintage) from the state-run former monopoly to rent them out (large industrial customers I'd think).

I was surprised to see such an old locomotive in operation, but apparently it's still good (i.e. economic) enough to shuttle cars from factory to port. Guess the air pollution restrictions aren't all that tough for diesel trains.

EDIT: didn't realize this is big business in Germany: https://railmarket.com/eu/germany/locomotive-rental-leasing

mchannon2• 2 years ago

I once bought a far larger supercomputer. It was 1/8 (roughly) of ASCI Blue Mountain. 72 racks. Commissioned in 1998 as #1 or #2 on the TOP500, officially decommissioned in 2004, purchased my 1/8 for $7k in ~2005.

Moving 72 racks was NOT easy. After paying substantial storage fees, I rented a 1500sf warehouse after selling off a few of them and they filled it up. Took a while to get 220V/30A service in there to run just one of them for testing purposes. Installing IRIX was 10x worse than any other OS. Imagine 8 CD's and you had to put them each in 2x during the process. Luckily somebody listed a set on eBay. SGI was either already defunct or just very unfriendly to second hand owners like myself.

The racks ran SGI Origin 2000s with CRAYlink interlinks. Sold 'em off 1-8 at a time, mainly to render farms. Toy Story had been made on similar hardware. The original NFL broadcasts with that magic yellow first down line were synthesized with similar hardware. One customer did the opening credits for a movie with one of my units.

I remember still having half of them around when Bitcoin first came out. It never occurred to me to try to mine with them, though I suspect if I'd been able to provide sufficient electrical service for the remainder, Satoshi and I would've been neck-and-neck for number of bitcoins in our respective wallets.

The whole exercise was probably worthwhile. I learned a lot, even if it does feel like seven lifetimes ago.

bri3d• 2 years ago

Wow, that's ridiculous. I bought two racks of Origin2000 with a friend in high school and that was enough logistic overhead for me! I can't imagine 72 racks!!

Installing IRIX doesn't require CDs; it's much, much easier done over the network. Back in the day it required some gymnastics to set up with a non-IRIX host, now Reanimator and LOVE exist to make IRIX net install easy. There are huge SGI-fan forums still active with a wealth of hardware and software knowledge - SGIUG and SGInet managed to take over from nekochan when it went defunct a few years ago.

I have two Origin 350s with 1Ghz R16ks (the last and fastest of the SGI big-MIPS CPUs) which I shoehorned V12 graphics into for a sort of rack-Tezro. I boot them up every so often to mess with video editing stuff - Smoke/Flame/Fire/Inferno and the old IRIX builds of Final Cut.

I think that by the time Bitcoin came out, Origin2000s would have been pretty majorly outgunned for Bitcoin mining or any kind of compute task. They were interesting machines but weren't even particularly fast compared to their contemporaries; the places they differentiated were big OpenGL hardware (InfiniteReality) with a lot of texture memory (for large-scale rendering and visualization) and single-system-image multiprocessor computing (NUMAlink), neither which would help for coin mining.

lightedman• 2 years ago

"The original NFL broadcasts with that magic yellow first down line were synthesized with similar hardware"

That was originally an XFL innovation.

strictnein• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure it was ESPN and the NFL? The creator of the tech seems to indicate that and 1998 predates the first go around with the XFL.

https://www.sri.com/press/story/the-first-down-marker-how-te...

ewams• 2 years ago

Really cool, do you have pictures or a blog post about this?

mchannon2• 2 years ago

Email me and I’ll send a photo.

Never been much of a blogger. This was from a bygone era, before I (or anyone I knew) had a smartphone.

saalweachter• 2 years ago

So, people with experience moving this sort of hardware--

Let's say you just wanted to have this transported to a warehouse. How much are we talking, between the transportation cost and the space to store it?

NickC25• 2 years ago

What could someone possibly do with this? It's cool as hell but 8 years old.

layoric• 2 years ago

I dunno, I still think the 2011-v3 platform that these Xeons can run in is still a great setup for a homelab. A bit power hungry but if you can build a dual core workstation with 36 cores, and 256GB ram for <$1000, that is a solid server. Sure, a bit more power hungry, but that would still make for a hell of an app/db server. That's basically an m4.16xlarge, same CPU generation, platform etc, (yes, without all the surrounding infra) that will cost you something like $0.10 per hour worth of energy to run.

Take the Dell T7910 for example (I use one of these for my homelab), you can pick up a basic one with low end CPU/RAM for sometimes as little as $300. Dumping all these 18 core E5s and DDR4 ECC on the market should make it even cheaper to spec out. Currently they go for about $100-150 each on the CPUs, and ~$150-200 for the RAM. Not bad IMO.

gautamcgoel• 2 years ago

The listing says that 1% of the nodes have RAM with memory errors. I assume this means hard errors since soft errors would just be corrected. Is this typical? Does RAM deteriorate over time?

dunham2• 2 years ago

Reading the whole paragraph, it sounds to me like they were accepting 1% errors rather than fixing the leaking cooling system.

fancyfredbot• 2 years ago

It's just not economical to run these given how power inefficient they are in comparison to modern processors.

This uses 1.7MW, or $6k per day of electricity. It would take only about four months of powering this thing to pay for 2000 5950X processors. Those would have a similar compute power to the 8000 Xeons in Cheyenne but they'd cost 1/4 the power consumption.

nerpderp82• 2 years ago

If you can get 1.7MW service, then you are paying utility rates, or around 100-150 per MWh, or as you quoted 4-6k per day. In Seattle, running this off peak would cost one about 104$/hr before the other fees.

I would be neat if a subset of this could be made operational and booted once in awhile a computer history museum. I agree that it doesn't make sense to actually run it.

https://seattle.gov/city-light/business-solutions/business-b...

whalesalad• 2 years ago

Will it run Crysis?

jonhohle• 2 years ago

Despite being SGI branded hardware, this was after the name was bought by Rackable and IIRC, SGi hardware became essentially rebadged Rackable hardware. Still cool, but not as cool as some custom MIPS hardware from old SGI.

blakespot• 2 years ago

The comments in some of the news posts covering the auction popping up are curious / amusing. Lots of supercomputer hate - "let's use a few PCs," etc.

ex: https://wccftech.com/iconic-5-34-pflops-cheyenne-supercomput...

9front• 2 years ago

Sold for $480,085.

Cheyenne Super Computer Auction

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