$2000 is a bit low for hardware, but if you're willing to contribute a bit more of your own money, you can get something cool. * NUMA-capable CPU. $3000 budget

$2000 is a bit low for hardware, but if you're willing to contribute a bit more of your own money, you can get something cool. * NUMA-capable CPU. $3000 budget for a lower-end NUMA-server (say, 2x Xeon Silver, or maybe 1x AMD EPYC) gets you the hardware needed to start playing with NUMA (non-uniform memory access). Or any other high-performance computing part really. * GPUs -- GPUs are very expensive right now, but an NVidia T4 is a bit over $2000 right now. A decent option to get into CUDA on your work budget. * Software -- A lot of professional software is somewhere from $500 to $4000 or so. Matlab, IDA, EagleCAD, VMWare, SQL Server, Oracle, etc. etc. Pick a tool, any tool, that might benefit you or your team, and use the training budget to get a personal license. * Networking -- $2000 is enough to start playing with various networks. Buy a bunch of Fiber-optic stuff and connect them together, switches, PCIe ports (ConnectX PCIe cards), fiber lines, transducers. SFP+, or SFP28 (28Gbit networks), 40Gbps, 100Gbps. VLANs, Cisco iOS, etc. etc. So much to play with, plenty of skills you'll gain only with playtime. * Various other technologies -- Dell iDRAC, SuperMicro IPMI, etc. etc. Have you learned how to use and install these features? If not, surely there's a $2000+ server from Dell, SuperMicro, HP (or other server provider) that is close to your budget? * Get that Talos II POWER9 computer to play with PowerPC. ------------ A lot of the other discussion points about books and/or training are no where near $2000. ACM Membership is great but only $100 to $200 / year. IEEE Membership is similar. Unless you can find like 30 papers to download in the next 2 days, you're not reaching your $2000 budget. Instead, the big-ticket items (obscure hardware, obscure software) easily gets you to $2000, $3000, or $4000 budgets in a single purchase. You should be aiming to blow-away your budget (and maybe spend a bit of your own money) and do something you normally wouldn't be able to do. Err on the side of going way overbudget.