[rescue] If the price wouldnt be that high... Cray CS6400's

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

Sigh.

Well, I've been emailing them since the original auction for three machine 
went up and generated some buzz here.  Seems I've talked him down from 
$2500 each, but they still want to move the entire lot.  Ugh.

I'm desperate to avoid having them ship these machines off to the
scrapper, because I absolutely must have more power supply modules to get
my current machine running... The one thing I've asked for several times
is an inventory of the major components - system boards, power supplies,
CPU modules if possible.  Hard not to be a pest, when the auction *says* 
to write to them for a complete inventory... :-/

I would be willing to coordinate a group buy, if anyone here is seriously 
interested.  As I mentioned before, "seriously" means:

	You have some place to at least store a cabinet that weighs 
	around 1500-1800 lbs, and deal with the shipping costs for an 
	item of that size;

	You have three-phase power available, if you want to actually run 
	the beastie;

	You can find the appropriate JTAG Sbus card and cable to build up 
	an SSP to boot the machine;

	You're willing to join my lobbying group to push Sun to release 
	the Cray-specific Solaris bits (the Cray Home Users Group, or 
	"CHUG", which implies that Beer is an integral part of every 
	meeting).

Okay, I threw that last one in, but it has definite T-shirt possibilities.

And as someone noted, with this particular auction the memory was
apparently stripped... why, I have no idea; "officially" the CS6400 RAM is
incompatible with all other Sun gear.  I'm hoping and praying that they
didn't pull the SIMMs and sell them off as SC2000 memory... the only
difference I can see by comparing the two is that the 6400 needs 60ns
parts, and the SS1000/SC2000's use 70ns parts.  If that's indeed the case,
it might be possible to find a source for these...

(Or, in a pinch, buy up a large batch of SC2000 sticks and convert them?  
MemoryTime, a local company here in Portland, used to do stuff like that -
you could walk in with a bag of random funky memory and walk out with
refurbed sticks in a different configuration.  I don't think they do that
anymore, but with a large enough batch maybe we could make it worth their
while, if they still have the equipment, and compatible 60ns chips can be
found... haven't talked with them in years.)

Anyway, I even offered to pay them a monthly _storage fee_ to take the
pressure off to move them out of the warehouse, to buy some time to figure
out how many machines I/we could rescue... I'm pursuing this on as many
fronts as possible.  This week/weekend my company is readying a product
launch and what day is it?  Friday?  Gee, 82 hours and counting... but
next week, when I can take the first day off since mid-DECEMBER, I plan to
take a hard look at my finances, see what the tax lady says about a refund
this year, and call up Centurian and haggle some more.  I've been remiss
in reporting back to the list, but I know that some of you are interested
and I'd _love_ to not only fix up the machine I have now, but help see
more of these great old hunks in service, instead of in storage.

One interesting side note:  I sent the URL to my boss and said "Wouldn't
it be cool to deploy our new highly-threaded application suite on a pool
of 896 CPUs for _only_ $13K?"  On his way to lunch he stopped by and said
"That's mighty impressive.  So, how big of a datacenter would we need to
run those?"  "Why, there's an empty one down on the 4th floor..." :-)

Swinging a deal to house these units here _could_ be an interesting
prospect:  we could write up an agreement where you'd buy the machine(s)  
you want, pay the pro-rated amount for shipping, and I'd set them up and
provide an IP address and access to a console server/SSP... submeter the
electrical panel and there ya go, you could own your own Cray CS6400 and
house it in a proper datacenter!  We'd have to put up webcams, obviously,
so you could show it off to your friends. :-)

Ah, well.  I'll keep after them about these machines.  And if anyone is
seriously interested in owning one (or two, or five! :-) let me know, and
perhaps we can pool resources.

-- Chris