Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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.

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.

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.

World of Warcraft sold decommissioned blades for about that much with no intention to be actually used. Just something to thru up in the cave.

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.

Going 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.

I was thinking the same thing. Worst case just sell off the CPUs and RAM.

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

Is it not "Personal" protective equipment?

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

You need PPE to protect your profession of moving stuff.

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.

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

Dump 8,064 old processors on eBay and you'll probably introduce some downwards price pressure.

this is basically "free grand piano" - not so free once you hire the movers and tuners

At least a piano doesn't require power and cooling to operate.

Not with that attitude...

That’s just the current bid and it hasn’t met the reserve.

The reserve price for the auction is $100k.

There is, but really only for the MIPS hardware.

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?

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...

>...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

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

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