Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Buying a Supercomputer is Stupid”.
Why don’t we jump right into our headline topic, which is of course the supercomputer auction? Good Lord? If I had a dollar for every single person who sent this bloody thing to me this week, you could, I could have bought it. The Cheyenne supercomputer has sold apparently for $ 480,000 80 $ 480,500 Top O. I can’t remember exactly, but it was in the I think it was in like the top 20 or top 10 supercomputers in the world, or something like that. It’S about 7 years old, though now, and if you guys read a little bit more into the details about it, you’ll probably figure out why, in spite of the fact that it was looking like it might go for as little as about 8,000 Us doll earlier in The week I had no interest whatsoever in bidding on this thing see I swear to if, if it went at 8 Grand and you didn’t buy it, that would have been a mistake that would have been. That would have been maybe a mistake. That would have definitely been a mistake. That would have been maybe a mistake. Okay, we need only go as far as here here. Let’S play a game: let’s play a game called how far into this page. Do I need to read to know what a bad idea it is to buy this thing? Cheyenne supercomputer looks good, so far.
Item name can confirm it’s good when these things match that is yeah the sale Lot number I mean that looks like a pretty lucky number to Cheyenne Wyoming dude, it’s 28 racks, 28 racks, all liquid cooling, that’s the e-s, the eells! There are 14 units weighing 1,500 lb each and I have to get this stuff from Wyoming up to our warehouse. Where here, let’s keep reading, I will have to find a place to store yes, 28 rack units containing a total of 145,000 CPU cores that draw, and – and this is this is a direct quote. This is a direct quote here: 1.7 million Watts underload.
Sir, are you aware that, with all of our buildings combined, we do not have enough power to actually run this thing still could have bought it? Okay, if it was 8 Grand, you still should have bought it. We could have salvaged it, but but there are more issues hold on cuz. We can keep reading. Let’S keep reading uh moving. The system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company. In fact, I don’t believe that the buyer is even allowed on the premises. So that’s something wait yeah because it has to be a profession. It’S a data center.
It’S a highly secure area. Okay, so there’s that and then no no, it gets even better. It gets even better aside from these being outdated AF like we’re talking Haswell grade CPUs. Here with ddr4 2400, this thing is flipping slow, uh.
It took a team of I believe it was a little less than 20 dedicated Engineers to run maintenance on this thing, and I’m not saying you should have ran it and they’ve been having issues with that maintenance to the point where they’re saying hm, it’s kind of Costing more to run this thing than it’s worth, because they’re, liquid cooling has apparently been leaking all over the place. This thing, this thing is a cluster and it seemed like there were some people out there who were serious about buying a supercomputer and like running it. Oh yeah, no and I’m I’m looking at this thing, going no brother, if you know anything about operating a supercomputer, you know that nobody is buying this thing to run it $ 480,000. Is honestly a scrap price, yeah, 100 %. You are, you are ripping cabling out of it. You are ripping CPUs and memory modules that is going straight to eBay you’re, not operating this thing, because anyone who has the kind of money to pay the $ 60,000 a month that it is estimated just to put electricity in this thing’s digital veins and find a Place that you can even get that electric El, don’t forget the cooling.
If you have that kind of money you can afford new hardware. You are not buying somebody’s, like ratted out Civic of a supercomputer and trying to lease out space on it. That’S just not how this works! 6 years ago, you made a video on the SFU supercomputer I did and that got 2.5 million views and it was 6 years ago. Okay, 2.5 million views just just for context.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the tech, vertical vertical is worth about 5 grand. So okay, but you know that’s not how the math Works. No, the math, the Math’s a little more favorable than that, but if I spent more than probably 50 to 100 Grand on this thing, I am I better be profiting on the tear down of it, because otherwise, I’m in I’m underwater, which gets I’m under, I agree At even if I make a number of videos guys, that’s not one video Yeah You’ got number of videos, three to five videos, I’m doing a series, it’s a it’s! A pickup Vlog we’re we’re driving to Wyoming boys uh. It’S that Mr Beast intro, where the camera whips out and you’ve got this huge semi behind you, I’m in an abandoned supercomputer. Meanwhile, it’s like 6 minutes from the nearest Micro Center, 100 % um, but yeah.
The the other problem is if you’re parting it out. You’D have to part it out like in the States. Oh yeah and you’d have to film all your content in the states.
I’M going to like I’m going to import this mess. You got to be kidding me, there’s no way, there’s no way. It was a fun thing to dream about it’s one of those things where it’s like. Oh man, wouldn’t it be cool to open a gaming hotel or start a you know, a a a peripheral gaming, peripheral business or you like. Oh, I had a. I had a cool idea and a fever dream and I woke up in the middle of the night and I went oh wait: a half a million dollars for what is essentially a gigantic e there’s no way at that point.
No, it doesn’t make, it doesn’t make any sense, but but you know what I definitely I oh. I didn’t think of that. What Travis social in the float plane chat? You could write it off. I could free content, I could. I could have written it off and gotten like five videos. I could I made a terrible mistake. You got to think harder man um, I I there’s like almost no chance, but if the person who bought it reached out, would you like do any content on it? I mean yeah I’d, be super down yeah yeah, of course, all right people, let’s figure out who the heck bought this realistically, it probably has some yeah yeah.
There’S there there’s no. This is, this is basically one of those like e computer shop, dot, whatever like eBay stores and they’re they’re they’re, ripping it apart. There’S there’s no way that anybody is actually going to try to operate this thing it is woefully out of date. They’Re high Ram units have 256 gigs. I mean there are gaming PCs out there, albeit not many, but there are gaming, PCs out there that have 256 gigs of ram in them.
These days like this is not. This has not aged well, and especially, it has not aged well with the way that the workloads for these supercomputers have evolved in the last seven years. There is a reason this is being decommissioned. This thing is a CPU supercomputer, which, ladies and gentlemen, is not how they build them right now it, as far as I could tell didn’t, really have any GPU compute units in it um. It’S also not designed with systems even that SFU supercomputer, that I checked out.
Six years ago had systems that had a terabyte or two terabytes or something of memory. In them they were, they were either four-way or eight-way CPU systems so that they could have these gigantic pools of memory so that they could work on extremely large data set. As far as I can tell, Cheyenne didn’t have any such nodes and didn’t have any such capabilities, so as data sets have grown and as the need for GPU compute um for these, for these supercomputing systems has grown it has. It has become not just out ofd in terms of the the how long it’s been since the hardware was released, but it has become outdated in terms of the overall design philosophy of the system in terms of the architecture of the system. It just didn’t make any sense, but uh that could be kind of a fun. Video was a lot of fun. Oh, it apparently does have 184 gpus shraff says 73 RTX 490s outperform this machine.
It could be kind of a fun video to like try to build. Like set up a like, we, we built the like Cheyenne supercomputer. That’S, actually that’s a really good idea and if ID thought of it, we probably would have gotten started on that this week.
I do wonder if we’ve missed the moment a little bit at this point like if we had the auction’s actually over yeah, if we’ thrown together a cluster uh just of like random, random motherboards and just loaded up as many gpus as we could have and freaking. Like like ethernet cabled them together and been like okay, I bought a supercomputer, but it isn’t what you think. Isn’T that one H that’d be pretty funny but yeah it’s. It probably missed the mark, a little bit. Yeah. 100. 1,680 pedop flops. I mean yeah. What’S a what’s a what’s a 7950 x uh P flops! Oh my goodness.
What is my? What is my browser doing? Do I look old enough that I need that um yeah, it doesn’t say I guess that would be. That would be Tera flops here. Let’S try! Let’S try Tera flops, I don’t know, I don’t know how many flops it has. How many, how many flops you got boys turns out.
Nobody cares about the flops of CPUs anymore right. Well, whatever I’m over it .