Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server.
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@digitalraven@retro.pizza This is why I can't understand the idea that groups that need this kind of computing wouldn't just buy the hardware and learn to or find someone to manage it. A few months at September's prices would pay for some ridiculously powerful hardware. A few months at today's prices would pay for some ridiculously powerful and ridiculously overpriced hardware now.
Too many people believed the marketing bull telling everyone to move everything to "the cloud". People who don't understand that they're being led by salespeople also don't have the foresight to understand how badly things can go, at least not until they go badly, like they have now.
@AnachronistJohn I do not see the relevance of what you are saying, since it appears at best tangential to what I posted.
My research group _is_ buying the hardware and I am managing it, there is no "cloud" involved (except for the AI-boosting scum). It's a matter of timings, research grants, and budget approvals that we have to buy now rather than back in September.
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@AnachronistJohn I do not see the relevance of what you are saying, since it appears at best tangential to what I posted.
My research group _is_ buying the hardware and I am managing it, there is no "cloud" involved (except for the AI-boosting scum). It's a matter of timings, research grants, and budget approvals that we have to buy now rather than back in September.
@digitalraven@retro.pizza Oops. I misread. I thought this was cloud spending. My apologies
Yes, getting approval in appropriate amounts of time is difficult and timing always has Murphy's Law working against us.
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@digitalraven@retro.pizza Oops. I misread. I thought this was cloud spending. My apologies
Yes, getting approval in appropriate amounts of time is difficult and timing always has Murphy's Law working against us.
@AnachronistJohn It's all good. Apologies if I was a bit sharp there, I've been arguing with techbros on various platforms.
And yeah, this is in some ways just the latest way that research funding has found to make things as inconvenient as possible.
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven
Yep. We have to keep up with queries to the root and TLD nameservers, and the machines we need to do that have tripled in price in the last three months.
I'm _really_ looking forward to this bubble bursting. I cannot express in words, how much I yearn for that day to arrive. -
Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven Our compute vendor warned us that after March 30 their prices are going up 250% and to order everything we need before then, so we scrambled to put in a $30M order by this week.
Yesterday they told us they not only wouldn't be filling that order (we can try to resubmit it at the higher prices), but they won't guarantee they can fill anything at all for the rest of the year.
Things is gettin interesting.
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven this is how AI solves climate change. If enough people die carbon output will drop.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven I bought a used EPYC CPU + supermicro motherboard + 512GB RM combo å bit over å year ago for ~$1500.
The same combo today? Capped to 128GB RAM, at $2500. 1/4 the RAM at 1.7x the price for one year older hardware.
Oh and the hard drives we put in the server? Over 2x the price for the same capacity. The SSDs too.
It's so bad.
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If there were any justice, Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in mass graves.
@digitalraven If there were any justice, accused child rapist Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in meters of ground penetration
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If there were any justice, Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in mass graves.
@digitalraven how many mass graves to you get to a drowned child attempting to get to claim asylum in a country that has distanced itself from their plight.
I'm sure somebody, in some government agency, has that calculation on hand
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What a mess. They shouldn't be allowed to.buy up the whole global supply of RAM Like that
out of curiosity, what research are you doing?
@fluffykittycat We study cognitive and neurological factors over a long-term population (the first lot recruited in the 1920s). A lot of the results are into markers of Alzheimer's and various kinds of dementia, both potential ways of reducing effects and early detection.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven
I can see the BOINC,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing , or similar, becoming more popular. -
@digitalraven That's a 330% increase. That's way, way, way beyond anything I've seen which makes me wonder if this particular vendor is price gouging. Out of curiosity, have you shopped around at all?
@fuzzygroup @digitalraven unfortunately not just a single vendor. We have seen similar increases in similar hardware with multiple distributors and OEMs. Anything that has decent amounts of RAM, flash, or HDD has been going up ludicrously fast with availability going down and being forecast to be near zero come Q3/Q4.
Likewise not doing "AI" bs, regular old compute on-premise.
If you want to follow along, open a price hisory graph for available ddr5 rdimm 64 GB RAM, go to a 6 month timescale.
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven
Don’t worry. When ChatGPT goes broke there’ll be loads of cheap RAM as the insolvency firm tries to monetise the assets. -
@digitalraven
Don’t worry. When ChatGPT goes broke there’ll be loads of cheap RAM as the insolvency firm tries to monetise the assets.@KimSJ @digitalraven Alas, I've heard that whilst the memory chips themselves are the same the surface-mounted boards are different to conventional PCs so would need reflowing/desoldering and then manually resoldering to new boards (which are normally done by pick'n'place machines which require the chips to be on sheets). I suspect even if the AI boards are "sold" at 1/4 price the resulting sticks will still be higher priced than they were a few months ago.
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@digitalraven Our compute vendor warned us that after March 30 their prices are going up 250% and to order everything we need before then, so we scrambled to put in a $30M order by this week.
Yesterday they told us they not only wouldn't be filling that order (we can try to resubmit it at the higher prices), but they won't guarantee they can fill anything at all for the rest of the year.
Things is gettin interesting.
@andthisismrspeacock @digitalraven @stroz and it's been a lot worse than that for people who can't make $30M orders, for some time now.
Equipment they'd already paid for sold out from under them, and being told it'll get filled in 2027 maybe, tough luck.
Orders that were allegedly already being built suddenly being cancelled.
Even systems that the hyperscalers are too stupid to use or admin, suddenly getting shoved back quarters at a time for lack of RAM or storage. -
Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven yep.
For our medical imaging researchers, I ordered a ~$60k server in October. The same config quoted yesterday is ~$127k.
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven LLM or American oligarchs?
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@digitalraven LLM or American oligarchs?
@manux LLM bros and their bubble in particular. To blame all oligarchs (and there is a lot to blame them for in general) absolves the LLM shitheads from specific responsibility.
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@fuzzygroup I have, and that increase is across the board for all vendors on the UK academic purchasing contracts. This server needs a reasonable amount of RAM — 4TB+, a lot by consumer standards, but mid-range for the compute we're doing.
I'm in the market for a new personal machine at home. Prices in this segment are about triple what they should be too.
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D drajt@fosstodon.org shared this topic
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Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000.
Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500
This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean.
@davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com
@digitalraven We are getting quotes that are now only good for 4 days. Not even 4 business days. So if they send the quote on Friday afternoon you have to purchase by Monday.
