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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 p
by mk_stjames 2y 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.
- chasil 2y agoThese 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 2y agoThe 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.
- w-ll 2y agoWorld of Warcraft sold decommissioned blades for about that much with no intention to be actually used. Just something to thru up in the cave.
- fnord77 2y agoI 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.
- RajT88 2y agoGoing off one listing for a E5-2697v4, $50 with free shipping, 386 already sold. If you figure after the double-dipping of eBay/Paypal and then shipping fees, that's ~$30 profit per CPU. 8024 x 30 = 241,920 USD. Not too shabby for what's got to be some weeks/months of work. You could probably assume that they can sell or scrap the rest of it for a bit more as well, minus the fees for storage and moving company.
- atlgator 2y agoI was thinking the same thing. Worst case just sell off the CPUs and RAM.
- slavik81 2y agoI 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.jpg https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra-open.jpg https://slerp.xyz/img/misc/argo-lyra-open.jpg