Someone seems to want it. Bidding is at $250,000 and counting. I guess someone didn’t get the memo about getting just a few nvidia cards! 73 Eugene W2HX My Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@w2hx/videos -----Original Message----- From: Gavin Scott via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, May 3, 2024 11:31 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Cc: Gavin Scott <gavin(a)learn.bio> Subject: [cctalk] Re: 5,34 Petaflop System Cheyenne It's a different world now with GPU and AI performance, so I strongly doubt Cheyenne will ever boot again. Somewhat sad that they're doing such a nice job of de-installing the machine, labeling all the cables etc. 5PF is just not impressive these days. A single Nvidia card will do more than that in FP8 I think which is probably good enough for AI training, and something like 100PF in FP4 for inference. At worst it's a small handful of Nvidia cards to completely replace that monster. It has 8,064 commodity CPUs, "E5-2697v4 (18-core, 2.3 GHz base frequency, Turbo up to 3.6GHz, 145W TDP)" which may still sell new (NOS?) for up to $2K each (though it's probably questionable whether the total future market amounts to anything close to 8K units), and 300TB of standard DDR4 ECC memory. That's probably what people are bidding on. The rest of it is likely getting melted. And it's something like 42 racks of stuff. But tune in for the exciting auction finish at 4PM Pacific. Auction will continue until 10 minutes elapses without a bid I believe.

Or maybe it's just metals recycling. If there's more than 120 ounces of gold in all those racks, that's $250k right there. paul

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 5:14 PM Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: But does he have 8,000 of them haha. Auction is at $435K now (past the end time) with multiple active bidders extending it.

Not bad for scrap value? ;) Don Resor Sent from someone's iPhone

In the 1980's I attended a US Gov't auction for a Vax 780.  It was being exported to South Africa and the State Dept stopped the transfer because it was ultimately going to a banned country.  Don't know which one, but I do remember the system was configured for 50Hz power.  50Hz power, disks, cpu, everything.  Wow. Doug On 5/3/2024 8:41 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:

On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 9:09 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote: Just getting it out of NCAR could be a substantial fraction of that. Per the auction documents it looks like about 100,000 pounds (~45,000kg) of racks. I think smuggling Nvidia cards would be substantially more viable.

I wonder how well that machine would do at bitcoin mining Sent from Nine<http://www.9folders.com/> ________________________________ From: CAREY SCHUG via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Saturday, May 4, 2024 12:28 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Cc: CAREY SCHUG Subject: [cctalk] Re: 5,34 Petaflop System Cheyenne I am not an expert, but are all petaflops the same? might there be some applications fo which this is relatively better than the nominally equivalent petaflops of nvidia? as in how intermediate results are shared between calculation units, this is likely to be more cross connected so values can be share faster, the nvidia would have to keep stopping and waiting to get values from another node? And of course, could it be some company that has one and wants a drop in backup or second site? and being bid against by competitors that DON'T want them to have a backup? <pre>--Carey</pre>

On 5/4/24 10:21, W2HX via cctalk wrote: Umm, it will consume about 4000 Dollars of electricity per day! That is not counting the cooling required, just the power input. that's about $15 million per year. Jon

On Sat, May 4, 2024 at 12:28 PM W2HX via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: I'm not really sure if Cheyenne could ever mine a single bitcoin at this point. Bitcoin mining (as I understand it) moved from CPUs (like Cheyenne, even if it has a lot of them) to GPUs many years ago, and it has now even been quite a few years since they abandoned the use of GPUs too. Today it's done on huge clusters of ASIC hash calculators. You need to be able to do something like 3,000 trillion SHA-256 hashes per second to make one Bitcoin per day (at least according to a quick search). If by "Bitcoin" you mean crypto-mining in general, there's probably something it could be used for, but it would be horribly inefficient compared to more modern hardware. The first uses for Cheyenne that seem to pop to mind (Crypto and AI) are actually the two WORST applications for it I think. It might still be reasonably good at the kind of simulations it was acquired to run (atmospheric sims, etc.)