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

[Koyote]

Skeezics Boondoggle <skeezics at q7.com> writes:

> 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).
> 

> 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. :-)
>


Speaking of pooling resources. if someone managed to work out a deal
like that (remote colo), what would it tkae for someone to go in on a
"group purchase" of one machine for those of us who are being poor
fathertobe nearly jobless folks?

I could put several hundred dollars in, but not enough to actually pay
for an entire machine....