I placed a low bid on an auction for 25 Elitedesk 800 G1s on a government auction and unexpectedly won (ultimately paying less than $20 per computer)
In the long run I plan on selling 15 or so of them to friends and family for cheap, and I’ll probably have 4 with Proxmox, 3 for a lab cluster and 1 for the always-on home server and keep a few for spares and random desktops around the house where I could use one.
But while I have all 25 of them what crazy clustering software/configurations should I run? Any fun benchmarks I should know about that I could run for the lolz?
Senior year of Highschool, I put Unreal Tournament on the school server. If it were me, I’d recreate that experience, including our teacher looking around the class. That was almost 20 years ago, I hope everyone is doing alright.
I have a box with 10 old laptops that I keep around, just for that. Unreal tournament 2004, Insane, Brood Wars and all the Id classics. I don’t get to set it up a lot, but when I do it’s always a hit.
Shitty k8s cluster/space heater?
According to Bush Jr. And Cheney you are now capable of building a super computer dangerous enough to warrant a 20+ year invasion
Depending on the actual condition of all those computers and your own skill in building I’d say you could rig a pretty decent home server rack out of all of those for really most purposes you could imagine, including as a personal VPN, personal RDP to conduct work on, personal test server for experimental code and/or testing potentially unsafe downloads/links for viruses
Shit you could probably build your own OS that optimizes for all that computing power just for the funzies, or even use it to make money by contributing its computing power to a crowd sourced computing project where you dedicate memory bandwidth to the project for some grad student or research institute to do all their crazy math with. Easiest way to rack up academic citations if you ever want to be a researcher!
What are you referencing in regard to the super computer investigation? Internet search failed me
https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/12/20/iraq-scores-hordes-of-ps2s-at-us-gamers-expense
I’m pretty sure this is it.
Weird. Thanks for finding it!
I think the only answer is “Doom”
But can they run Crysis?
If OP actually does do this I recommend Odamex
Although he’d also need 25 monitors lol
Although he’d also need 25 monitors lol
Back to the government auctions then!
We’re you thinking like Doom Lan party, or some weird supercluster with the pure focus of running Doom?
If you purchased them from the federal government they won’t have hard drives.
State government, and it says they come with SSDs. They came from a school so presumably they’re from a lab or are upgraded staff PCs, both would be pretty low sensitivity. Maybe I’ll learn the final test answers for Algebra 1 at worst!
Might be fun to do some forensic data recovery and see if anything was missed though
Ooh, or behind the scenes email drama from staff!
25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.
i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn’t that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don’t think I’d bother with a room full of crufty old PC’s if I was pursuing something like that.
That’s less than a kettle, in the UK at least.
Of course I wouldn’t want to be running that all the time, because electric ain’t cheap.
UK here, we could run that from 1 plug.
Psh 1 plug aint shit. Every Pic I see from anyone who lives out in those ghettos of India, Central America or any spacific islands they also only rock 1 plug but theyre running the corner store, the liquor store, the hospital, their style of little school middle school and old school, 3 hair salons if Latin or 3 nail salons if spasific, Bollywood, every stadium from every country in the world cup, and always 1 dude trying to squeeze 1 more plug in cuz hes runing low bats. Idk why the American ghetto is so pussy. One time i seen a family that fuckin put covers over empty sockets?!? Come on dog thats like wearing a condom jerking off. NGL tho, I get super jelly seeing pictures from those countries thp with their thousands of power lines, phone lines, sidelines, cable lines, borderlines, internet lines… fuck I don’t know much about how my AOL works but those wizards must be streaming some Hella fast Tokyo banddrifts with all them wires.
those wizards must be streaming some Hella fast Tokyo banddrifts with all them wires.
That part is wrong for India, at least.
Here’s a random site with some stats
India, you can expect ~100Mb/s with FTTH and 50Mb/s otherwise. Reliability is even worse.Rest is right.
India has gigabit fiber
And Japan has a 300+ Tb/s connection. Your point?
My point is that the average Indian is not doing “Hella fast Tokyo banddrifts” (not sure what banddrift even means, but no).And yes, a 1Gb/s connection is theoretically available, but how many people are using the ~₹4000/month connection?
Considering how many people tend to just not have Broadband at home, relying just on mobile internet, we can see how things compare with others.
Also, to point to the tread starter, most of the “thousands of” cables that you see on poles in congested areas, are just abandoned cables from older installations which nobody cared to remove.
I’m not the same dude that was talking about banddrifts and congested poles.
Indian, btw.
Also ~100Mb/s is in no way the average speed in an Indian household. It’s usually lower. I also don’t see any specific mentions of india in your link up there to that random site.
Also ~100Mb/s is in no way the average speed in an Indian household.
You’re right. It’s not.
I also don’t see any specific mentions of india in your link up there to that random site.
I don’t see any either. Guess why. Because it only has the top 10, further emphasising the point that :
the average Indian is not doing “Hella fast Tokyo banddrifts”
Jack into the local coffee shop
This is only about 21 amps. Most outlets in a home are 15amps but 20amps isn’t unheard of. From one outlet doubtful but yes one house would provide that much power easily if you split them up to three or 4 rooms on different breakers.
Now it would be fun to watch his electric meter spin like a saw blade … (yes I’m old … I remember meters that had spinning discs)
Just two 15A breakers is enough actually. Outlets are supposed to be able to sustain 80% power, so you should be able to pull 1.44kW from a singly puny Nema 5-15.
Well true but I was assuming the circuits had some things drawing a little power. Flipping on a device and tripping a breaker with 12 machines on it wouldn’t be ideal :)
I have done this before in my upstairs home lab. 3 beefy ESXi machines, some nas storage, and a basic 10gbe switch eats up a lot of a single 15amp circuit. And apparently turning on a TV pushes it over the edge. Luckily the UPS saved my but while a reset the breaker and shut some stuff off.
deleted by creator
I won’t be leaving all of them on for long at all. I’ve got a few basically unused 15A electrical circuits in the unfinished basement (can see the wires and visually trace the entire runs) I’ll probably only run all 25 long enough to run a linpack benchmark and maybe run some kind of AI model on the distributed compute then start getting rid of at least half of them
I have a couple of these (only the G2 and G3 SFF) and they consume between 6-10w when not under load, and they max out at 35w (or 65w depending on CPU). I run proxmox with 64gb ram and they are surprisingly efficient.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PSU Power Supply Unit SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network k8s Kubernetes container management package
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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Hmm, get 25 monitors and friends and play one of those starship bridge simulators like https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/
I volunteered as tribute to be one of these ‘Friends’
You made me remember PULSAR - Lost Colony which is a decent iteration of co-op space bridge sim!
Oh, that one was a blast! I need to get my nerd herd to revisit it… Although all we did was play liars dice while the ship was on fire.
Xonotic!
I certainly wouldn’t want pay the power bill from leaving a bunch of these running 24/7, but would work fine if you wanted to learn cluster computing.
You could always load them up with a bunch of classic games and get all your friends over for a LAN party.
Do you have particularly cheap or free electricity?
12 cents per kilowatt-hour. I certainly don’t plan on leaving more than a couple on long term. I might get lucky with the weather and need the heating though :)
a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.
these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.
I think you’re not giving 4th gen enough credit. My wife’s soon-to-be-upgraded desktop is built on a 4th gen i5 platform, and it generally does the job to a decent level. I was rocking a 4790k and GTX970 until 2022, and my work computer in 2022 was on an even older i5-2500 (more held back by the spinning hard drive than anything. Obviously not a great job, but I found something much better in 2022) my last ewaste desktop-turned-server was powered by an i5-6500 (which is a few percentage points better performance than the 4th gen equivalent) and I have a laptop I use for web browsing and media consumption that’s got a 6700HQ in it.
I’ve already got a few people tentatively interested, and I honestly accepted the possibility of having to pay to recycle them later on. Should be a fun series of projects to be had with this pallet of not-quite-ewaste
The i5-6500 is my favorite CPU
They are fine honestly. It depends on your expectations
If I were you I might try deploying a mini enterprise network with permissions and things. It would be fun to do it with active directory to try to practice pentesting, or it would also be fun to do with linux to try to learn more about deploying linux in enterprise environments.
This is pretty high on the to-do list. I plan on virtualization a bunch of it, but it would be pretty easy to have one desktop hosting each subnet of client PCs and one hosting the datacenter subnet. Having several hosts to physically network means less time spent verifying the virtual networks work as intended.
Also playing with different deployment tools is a goal too. Having 2-3 nearly-identical systems should be really useful for creating unified Windows images for deployment testing
BOINC! Do some science. :)
If I had 25 surprise desktops I imagine I’d discover a long dormant need for a Beowulf cluster.
The thought did cross my mind to run Linpack and see where I fall on the Top500 (or the Top500 of 2000 for example for a more fair comparison haha)
- Slurm cluster
- MPI development
