I may have accidentally hardwared

[fivemack]

A dual Skylake Silver 4114 machine is winging its way to me as soon as I send the right credit card details to my supplier; I wanted the extra memory bandwidth from dual six-channel over single four-channel, and couldn't face the price delta to go up to Gold 6xxx for the the extra FMA512 units.

Would anyone have the slightest use for a 48-core Opteron machine with 64G memory? It is seven years old but still works very nicely, it uses about 500W of electricity when all the cores are busy and offers comparable performance on very-parallel jobs to ten cores of i7/4790K.

[pinhodecarlos]

Tom, please send me some pictures of the machine.

[Mysticial]

7 years ago, someone gave me a 2007-era quad-Barcelona machine with 8GB of (single-channel) ram for the sole purpose of NUMA programming.

As of today, I'm still using it for that purpose - through it really shows its age with random crashes, insufficient memory, overall slowness.

The problem is that I reside in the US...

[VBCurtis]

Originally Posted by Mysticial

7 years ago, someone gave me a 2007-era quad-Barcelona machine with 8GB of (single-channel) ram for the sole purpose of NUMA programming.

As of today, I'm still using it for that purpose - through it really shows its age with random crashes, insufficient memory, overall slowness.

The problem is that I reside in the US...

Does your machine use ECC (registered, I think) DDR2? If so, I have some sticks for you. How many empty slots do you have? I think I have 12-16GB worth of 1GB and 2GB sticks.

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by fivemack

Would anyone have the slightest use for a 48-core Opteron machine with 64G memory? It is seven years old but still works very nicely, it uses about 500W of electricity when all the cores are busy and offers comparable performance on very-parallel jobs to ten cores of i7/4790K.

My 48-core has Noctua heatsinks/fans. Is this machine of yours noisy? What CPU chips does it have?

[Mysticial]

Originally Posted by VBCurtis

Does your machine use ECC (registered, I think) DDR2? If so, I have some sticks for you. How many empty slots do you have? I think I have 12-16GB worth of 1GB and 2GB sticks.

Yes, it's ECC registered DDR2. Currently 4 x 2GB - one channel/socket. Mobo has 16 slots total (4/socket). So there's 12 extra slots.

The problem is that I don't think all the slots work anymore. There was a period where I didn't turn it on for a year. And when I did, it didn't post. It was only when I moved all the sticks to the 2nd channel on each socket did it finally post. (I did it all at once - I didn't test each socket specifically.)

So I'm unsure if it's even worth trying to salvage at this point. I only turn it on 2 or 3 times a year for NUMA-related benchmarks and tests. I intentionally avoid using it as much as possible to preserve its life.

[kruoli]

Do you already have a price point in mind? And would you mind sharing exact specifitcations? :) Like exact CPU model (number), memory clocks and timings...

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Mysticial

7 years ago, someone gave me a 2007-era quad-Barcelona machine with 8GB of (single-channel) ram for the sole purpose of NUMA programming.

As of today, I'm still using it for that purpose - through it really shows its age with random crashes, insufficient memory, overall slowness.

The problem is that I reside in the US...

Re. overseas shipping, you should look into eBay's global shipping progam - basically, in order to broaden the reach of its sales platform eBay arranges for sellers in country X to ship goods meant for country Y to a local hub in X, where it collects goods going X -> Y and forwards them in its own container/package freight shipments. I sold an item to a fellow in the UK a couple months ago, shipping cost was same for the transaction as for in-country.

If the same applies for UK-to-US shipments, Tom could put his box up for fixed-price sale at some agreed-upon price on eBay, coordinate the item's "going live" time with you, you snap it up as soon as it goes live. Tom could figure the ship costs using the eBay seller page, maybe charge some nominal price on top of that (whatever he hopes to get for his item + trouble.)

[pinhodecarlos]

Or Tom can give the machine to Carlos for free and Carlos will run it at home for NFS@Home post-processing with the post-processors guys having login to the machine.Tom just needs make a fresh Linux installation with MPI on it. Carlos can collect the machine from Tom’s home.

With this way it will be a dedicated machine for NFS@Home.

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Re. overseas shipping, you should look into eBay's global shipping progam - basically, in order to broaden the reach of its sales platform eBay arranges for sellers in country X to ship goods meant for country Y to a local hub in X, where it collects goods going X -> Y and forwards them in its own container/package freight shipments.

Which in Canada, basically doubles the price of buying cheap things off eBay from the US, due to the double shipping, fees, and taxes. I basically stopped buying things on eBay because of that nonsense.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Which in Canada, basically doubles the price of buying cheap things off eBay from the US, due to the double shipping, fees, and taxes. I basically stopped buying things on eBay because of that nonsense.

Ah, I see - I only saw things from the seller side for the one item I sold this way, now that I check the fine print, I see what you're talking about, i.e. the buyer still pays the extra international-fees:

Buyer charges

o In your listing, the buyer will see estimated shipping and import charges; the full and final charges will be available for them to view at checkout. They can also view what they’ve been charged on the Order details page

o The shipping charges the buyer sees include any US shipping charges that you specify, as well as international shipping, handling, and other fees

The import charges include any customs duties, taxes, brokerage, and other fees
o You receive the item price and the domestic shipping and handling amount that you specified directly from your buyer

So much for my evil scheme to get eBay to subsidize all my future international mailing this way. :) (I really did think that due to their economies of scale they could do this on the cheap, at least between high-traffic countries. Or maybe they do, but still charge the buyers 'retail'. and pocket the difference.)