Cheyenne supercomputer with 8,064 Xeon e5-2697v4 and 313,344GB of DDR4 auction!

[wildpig1234]

Personal Property Management System (gsaauctions.gov)

Current bid is $101,000 for 8064 e5-2697 v4 (18C) cpus and 313,344GB 2400 DDR4 and 40PB storage. I wonder what are the size of the ram modules and the HDD sizes.

Auction closes on May 5 at 6:11pm CST

Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer | Ars Technica

Anyone interested in pooling some $ together for cheap DDR4 and 2697 v4 cpu and cheap HDD?

Even at $300K, that would still be pretty cheap for the number of cpu and amount of ram!

Hoping there will be a BIG drop in 2697 v4 and DDR4 2400 soon!

 

[wildpig1234]

Memory: DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank, 64 GB per node, with 3 High Memory E-Cells having 128GB per node

So can i assume that the ram modules are only of the 8GB and 16GB? ;( Was hoping for 32GB or 64GB ones....lol..

 

[Cruzader]

Hoping there will be a BIG drop in 2697 v4 and DDR4 2400 soon!

Its "only" 4000 nodes worth of cpu/ram, there are liquidations 5-10-20x that size hitting the market on a weekly basis all year.

When i get a notice along the line of "We just had another 20 000 of this model come in" since its a model ive been buying, they are very open to giving bargain pricing on the CTO units.
But they dont drop the ram/cpu price based on it.

 

[foureight84]

I can't wait to see one of the Youtube sysadmin cosplayers debut this in their video.

 

[Layla]

Its "only" 4000 nodes worth of cpu/ram, there are liquidations 5-10-20x that size hitting the market on a weekly basis all year.

When i get a notice along the line of "We just had another 20 000 of this model come in" since its a model ive been buying, they are very open to giving bargain pricing on the CTO units.
But they dont drop the ram/cpu price based on it.

Where does all that volume go? eBay doesn't seem to do that kind of volume of RAM, CPUs, or CTO, unless there are a lot more people than expected just clicking Buy It Now at the ~4x higher than reasonable prices a lot of gear is listed at?

 

[wildpig1234]

Its "only" 4000 nodes worth of cpu/ram, there are liquidations 5-10-20x that size hitting the market on a weekly basis all year.

When i get a notice along the line of "We just had another 20 000 of this model come in" since its a model ive been buying, they are very open to giving bargain pricing on the CTO units.
But they dont drop the ram/cpu price based on it.

Still, if some of these get sold, we should see some good price for the 2697v4 . But a bit disappointed that these are small size ram modules

 

[Cruzader]

Where does all that volume go? eBay doesn't seem to do that kind of volume of RAM, CPUs, or CTO, unless there are a lot more people than expected just clicking Buy It Now at the ~4x higher than reasonable prices a lot of gear is listed at?

The listed price and what they will accept is very different.
Even if they will accept a 150-250 offer for of a CTO they will still all keep the listing price at 500-600.

Its not in any of the large sellers interest to start undercutting down to 150-250 list price.
The people buying multiple/volume already approach them for a different price, they want as much as they can from the people buying single units as buy now.
Its better for their longterm sales to keep a somewhat stable market and rather recycle hardware if needed.

There are some smaller players going a bit rogue, but they tend to get cut off from buying more.
Last year a small European seller tried to shake things up a bit on ebay by listing the same stuff at 199-249 that rest was listing at 599-999.
Like R640, R740, dl380 g10 and c240 m5.

The larger players will not go after them on price, they will squeeze the suppliers to stop selling to them.
Listing prices on eBay from the larger players tend to be viewed as the perceived value and price norm, its in their interest to keep that as high as possible even tho most units will be sold for less.

It looks like a much better deal from my side of the table if i get 20 servers that was listed at 599 for 100/ea than if they were listed for 199.

 

[wildpig1234]

I have already added 2697 v4 and ddr4 to my ebay search. Let's see how much the price will change in the next few months.
Wondering how much this auction would end at.

 

[Cruzader]

I have already added 2697 v4 and ddr4 to my ebay search. Let's see how much the price will change in the next few months.
Wondering how much this auction would end at.

Id expect v4 in general to start going faster down since scalable is going up, that should be a indication of demand starting to shift over.

 

[Magnet]

How are they going to sell 8000 CPUs and 300TB of DDR4 2400 RAM.

Is there a market for this? Even so, the winner will flood the market and kill their profits.

 

[nutsnax]

How are they going to sell 8000 CPUs and 300TB of DDR4 2400 RAM.

Is there a market for this? Even so, the winner will flood the market and kill their profits.

If the DDR4 is cheap enough I will load the boat with 16GB sticks for all of my servers. If I can get them for $5 per stick or something like that I might as well. I did the same with $20 64GB DDR3 sticks.

 

[Cruzader]

How are they going to sell 8000 CPUs and 300TB of DDR4 2400 RAM.

Is there a market for this? Even so, the winner will flood the market and kill their profits.

There are multiple brokers selling more than this in an average week.

The 2nd hand market is massive.

 

[chrgrose]

Its "only" 4000 nodes worth of cpu/ram, there are liquidations 5-10-20x that size hitting the market on a weekly basis all year.

When i get a notice along the line of "We just had another 20 000 of this model come in" since its a model ive been buying, they are very open to giving bargain pricing on the CTO units.
But they dont drop the ram/cpu price based on it.

What mailing list do I need to be on to see what this "we" has available?

 

[unwind-protect]

Are these just networked dual-CPU nodes, or do they have some system to share memory between cores across nodes?

 

[Jaket]

Are these just networked dual-CPU nodes, or do they have some system to share memory between cores across nodes?

It's a lot more customized I believe it's a multi node unit it's all liquid cooled as well in a per rack bases. Which has had some leaks they said.

 

[Cruzader]

What mailing list do I need to be on to see what this "we" has available?

Just ask the ones you usualy buy from to send you inventory updates, i get once a month from most I regularly buy from.

If you flat out tell them what you are looking for or keep buying something they will give you a heads up.

The 3 i buy the most from ive bought from regularly for years.
If you are always buying a specific model/config whenever they get it, the rep you deal with will let you know when they get them.

 

[chrgrose]

Are these just networked dual-CPU nodes, or do they have some system to share memory between cores across nodes?

I know the hardware here is proprietary, but I don't think there is any special attempt at treating multiple nodes as a shared memory system, which is normal for government HPC clusters. Codes using multiple nodes will rely on message passing over the network.

Bid almost 300k now! I will be a little surprised if it goes much higher, although perhaps not given the attention this sale is receiving.

 

[wildpig1234]

Bid almost 300k now! I will be a little surprised if it goes much higher, although perhaps not given the attention this sale is receiving.

STH effect!

There are multiple brokers selling more than this in an average week.

The 2nd hand market is massive.

Distribute to multiple sellers in multiple areas. They just have to sell slightly below the current going price

If the DDR4 is cheap enough I will load the boat with 16GB sticks for all of my servers. If I can get them for $5 per stick or something like that I might as well. I did the same with $20 64GB DDR3 sticks.

Here's the manual for the SGI® ICE™ XA :

https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-6399-001.pdf

See page 24. Each of the dual processor slot support FOUR DDR4. meaning 8 slots total for each of the 64GB node meaning 8GB sticks ;(

Looks like we are gonna being getting mostly 8GB sticks ;(.

 

[piranha32]

It's a lot more customized I believe it's a multi node unit it's all liquid cooled as well in a per rack bases. Which has had some leaks they said.

I still would love to get a couple. Not always you can snatch a piece of a famous supercomputer, and maybe use it in own computational cluster.

 

[Markess]

Well at least it can be broken up into usable parts. Back in the early 90s, the engineering department where I was attending grad school tried to get rid of an early Cray and it wound up going for peanuts. Not yet old enough to be some rare museum piece, and not really usable for anything other than specialized computations that newer, cheaper, smaller systems couldn't do faster...and on regular AC Power. I guess I could understand that. Not only could it not play "Duke Nukem", but it couldn't even run the old text based "Colossal Cave Adventure"...so pretty darn useless.