6 ms·
Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction ends with $480,085 bid
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 2y ago> Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit. > At a conservative estimate of $25 million for the array to be constructed, the auction sale is only 2% of the sticker price of Cheyenne. Honestly $480k sounds like a fair price. This is 8 year old hardware, in any reasonable depreciation scheme the book value is $0. If you just flip it you probably break about even, considering that prices are not going to be able to sell 8000 of those Xeon processors at their current market price. If you just want the compute, this supercomputer is equivalent to about $70000 in modern GPUs (assuming your compute needs fit the processing model of GPUs), so even with free power it's not terribly attractive to buy the system to run it yourself.
- chomp 2y agoI’m pretty sure you can’t just up and toss it on eBay like the article says, the supercomputer is subject to export controls.
- bombcar 2y agoYou can’t flip the CPUs instantly, but if you’re a company that supplies older parts to people who need them, and can stock them on the shelf, you ought to be able to get most of the market value - eventually. I’ve paid for a motherboard of a off-lease hardware because even though it was about the price of a tune new off-lease server, it was simpler for me than rebuilding the OS for a newer piece of hardware. And data center equipment is so fast to swap even motherboards. If a CPU burned out in this I’d just get another.
- tengbretson 2y agoYeah. There was a time back in like 2016-17 where i think it was Facebook that was decommissioning an old data center and that alone crashed the market for E5 v2 Xeons
- defrost 2y agoWhich raises the question, is there a blog | twitter account tracking datacentre decommissions | revamps with related hardware expected to be released to second market for people that want good deals on X year old then bleeding edge gear?
- justsomehnguy 2y agoIt's extremely regional. It would be better to invest on something what would track the things you need and notify you if the price drops or there is a surge in availability. And an anecdote to complement this: I have 1155 desktop PC with Pentium G2020 (2cores/2threads, ugh). I can fit almost anything Ivy/Sandy Bridge in the mobo, but... i7 3770 is still $300, while various refurb Xeons E3 v2 are $20-30. And the best part is what even if I buy something like 1270v2 (4c/8t, full eq for 3770) it would still be a more than a decade old system and it wouldn't improve the performance much.
- bombcar 2y agoIt’s exceptionally regional once it is full systems as they’re heavy as hell. Find a local scrapper and get in touch and you can often save tons by avoiding shipping.
- omnimus 2y agoYears ago i went and looked for most powerful 1155 processor my old motherboard supported and i think it was i7 3770 - i bought it for 20usd. How it can be 300 now?
- yial 2y ago
- ip26 2y ago$25 million also seems likely to have included labor, cooling, and possibly software and support, none of which are saleable capital assets.
- mrandish 2y ago> Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 Three (pretty big) caveats to add: * Any significant quantity of those CPUs and RAM sticks hitting the used market at once will depress the selling price. So they need to be sold over several years during which the baseline demand (and price) will continue to fall. * The sale contract had fairly onerous requirements about the professional personnel and methods of removal permitted, all of which will add to the buyer's upfront costs on top of transport, storage and sales costs. * Since there are known failed components in the lot, all the pulled parts will need to be tested or sold as-is. I'm surprised it got bids that high and I think the article implying the buyer got a steal is overblown.
- rasz 2y agoFirst caveat is even bigger. There already is a HUGE amount of those Xeons and ram modules on the market coming from China where old servers get scrapped, and market is not soaking them in. Nobody needs $18 ancient Xeons. You will never sell 10K of those CPUs in your life time, even if you lower price to $1 a pop.
- justinclift 2y agoWonder how much gold (etc) is in these chips then? Might be a case of actual recycling being the best course of action.
- terribleperson 2y agoBuying this supercomputer for 480k and parting it out for 700k doesn't sound profitable. The amount of labor involved in that sort of business is substantial, you have to store the whole thing while you do it, and you're going to crash the ebay market for those parts to boot. Unless the buyer already has buyers lined up for bulk purchases, I don't think parting it out would make any sense.
- bombcar 2y agoSee the previous thread - I called it ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201184
- metadat 2y agoIn the spirit of Dang, because he's AFK or something this rainy day: Thanks! Macro-expanded: Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197277 (5 days ago, 154 comments)
- metadat 2y agoP.s. bombcar, would you be so kind as to drop me an email at metadat.luvs.u@gmail.com ? I would like to keep in touch, you're amazing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Uptrenda 2y agoIf they bought the super computer with the goal of doing actual computation I really hope they know what they're getting themselves into. For example: if you just look at the clock speed and the cores you might think that you can calculate some kind of cost to do the work you need. But that would be extremely simplistic because the way CPUs work is so complex. CPUs have features that will execute certain work loads faster, that can cache certain instructions, and be more efficient with the same resources. So you might have CPUs that have a lower clock speed and core number that still blow older CPUs (that 'look better') out of the water. It can be hard to know how well your CPU is going to perform with the instructions you generate until you have it tbh. You could get a sense of how fast it is compared to other processors with benchmarks. But I don't know how accurate it's going to be overall. A lot of the time you end up with unexpected results; CPUs that seem cheap are usually cheap for a reason though.
- knappe 2y agoI mean, this is literally what linpack was invented to do. It is used as a standard benchmarking tool.
- LASR 2y agoYou can get these chips on eBay for quite cheap now. I run a couple in a dual Xeon home server. But imo, the power consumption is just not worth it. Might just switch to a regular desktop running an i5.
- allears 2y agoDarn, and I was just about to offer $480,086.
- chriscappuccio 2y agoThey bid too high
- nothercastle 2y agoCould you use the hardware to start a Low end cloud provider? With pricing per core many low end users won’t really know the difference…
- m463 2y agoI kind of wonder if the profitability of these types of companies are based on perf/watt, or more directly electricity cost. Sort of how the electricity of mining a bitcoin is orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying a bitcoin.
- Bayart 2y agoYeah, cloud computing is a streightforward energy efficiency business. That's why the pricing of enterprise hardware is always pretty frontloaded.
- dannyw 2y agoIt’s certainly not orders of magnitudes higher. A S21 Hydro can do a terahash for 16 joules. At the current difficulty, you need approx 525,000 kWh to mine a bitcoin. At $0.16 a kWh, you’re looking at $84k to mine a bitcoin, worth $63k. That’s not orders of magnitudes higher. If you can get cheaper electricity and are willing to pay the capex then you can make a profit.
- m463 2y agowow, thank you for doing the math. I guess I haven't been keeping up with bitcoin vs electricity cost. I was going to buy a bitcoin miner when bitcoin was ~$500 and in short order the electricity cost of running the miner exceeded the cost of bitcoin and started getting worse. Now with bitcoin value > 1000x ... hmmm. maybe my assumptions are plain wrong.
- justinclift 2y agoLooks for corresponding auction bids on any solar panel farms getting liquidated? :)
- 2y ago
- EMCymatics 2y agoWhy was this decommissioned?
- gpjt 2y agoDon't know for sure, but from the article: > This high failure rate is the reason for the sale, with upkeep made challenging by the fact that Cheyenne "is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray."
- EMCymatics 2y agoI don't believe that.
- applied_heat 2y agoWhy not? Pipes and connections can leak? If all were installed at the same time the same way if one leaks likely others will too.