this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Seems like it's cheap to start the bidding at $2500 but the cheapest thing is probably the initial purchase price after moving it, buying the needed cabling, and electricity bills.
I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.
Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn't as specialized as I expected.
Yup, most of these are just a lot of relatively normal hardware put together into one system.
Whoever buys it will most likely just part it out and sell it on ebay.
It's all Broadwell Xeons. Sure, there's 8000 of 'em, but after you factor in purchase price, moving and storage costs, time spent parting out nodes, shipping costs, etc... I think you'd have a hard time breaking even, and for an end user you can get like 4x the FLOPS per socket at half the power consumption with current server CPUs.
There's a reserve price
That I get, but I'm sure the reserve isn't that high if the starting bid is at $2500. It just seems low for the $30,000,000 the computer cost in 2017.