QuinnMar 5
Everyday Cyborg

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

Mar 3 at 11:26amWeb
Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 3
To say that everyone involved in Anthropic, OpenAI, nVidia, Oracle, and the rest of the spicy-autocorrect bubble that surrounds these scum should be burned alive is AN INSULT TO FIRE
Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 3
If there were any justice, Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in mass graves.
Show threadTak!Mar 5
@digitalraven If there were any justice, accused child rapist Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in meters of ground penetration
Show threadNature PunkMar 5

@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 :(

Show threadcraignicolMar 4
@digitalraven hospitals need fire. It's the only thing that destroys pathogens and parasites.
Show threadScott Johnson / FutureFarmerMar 3
@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?
Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 3
@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.
Show threadBillMar 5

@digitalraven @fuzzygroup

I'm in the market for a new personal machine at home. Prices in this segment are about triple what they should be too.

Show threadSimon BMar 5
@fuzzygroup @digitalraven I bought some 2.3TB ones before Christmas. I wanted 3TB but I knew if I requoted the price would leap massively due to the RAM shortage, and my original quote would expire leaving me with nothing.
I'm worried about the 10PB of storage we need to buy this year though
Show threadMichael T BabcockMar 4
@fuzzygroup @digitalraven this is not one vendor. Everything in RAM and solid state storage is basically sold out.
Show threadRaymond RussellMar 5
@mikebabcock @fuzzygroup @digitalraven
I was trying to explain what was happening to my old dad who has little interest in IT. He's a car guy so the best analogy I could come up with was to ask him imagine one the big car companies only producing vehicles to sell for motor sport and some others pre-selling a chunk their production to motor sport companies.
Show threadMichael T BabcockMar 5
@raymierussell @fuzzygroup @digitalraven the problem of course is that Motorsport is a tiny fraction of car production irl but yes. One solid state drive manufacturer said that were sold out for this year back in November already. It's going to be a bad year.
Show threadRaymond RussellMar 5
@mikebabcock @fuzzygroup @digitalraven
Lol, its the curse of the analogy, it only takes you so far until it diverges too far from the thing you are comparing it too.
Show threadMark MasonMar 5
@raymierussell @mikebabcock @fuzzygroup @digitalraven how about : making huge sculptures out of car tyres becomes a fashion fad and billionaires bought up all the world’s tyre production for the next year in order to build bigger and more ridiculous giant car tyre sculptures.
Show threadMichael T BabcockMar 5
@markmason @raymierussell @fuzzygroup @digitalraven with loans from the car tyre manufacturers.
Show threadMark MasonMar 5
@mikebabcock @raymierussell @fuzzygroup @digitalraven these giant tyre sculptures are huge, ugly and dangerous but the billionaires keep telling everyone that they’re the next big thing.
Show threadEikeMar 5

@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.

Show threadJackieMar 4

@digitalraven that could be used for serious calculations in physics and chemistry.

Imagine the amount of DFT iterations you could do on that thing

Show threadFluffy Kitty CatMar 4

@digitalraven

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?

Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 5
@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.
Show threadFluffy Kitty CatMar 6
@digitalraven cool! Is it statistical computing or are you running simulations too?
Show threadBitslingers-R-UsMar 4

@digitalraven 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.

Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 4

@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.

Show threadBitslingers-R-UsMar 4

@digitalraven 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.

Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 4

@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.

Show threadBill WoodcockMar 4
@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.
Show threadBill WoodcockMar 8
@digitalraven

I just checked the list price of the servers we use. Since December, it's gone up from $118k to $494k each. I mean, nobody pays list, but the folks with the shortest discounts get served first in markets like this. Which means that the AI bubble will get served before critical infrastructure.
Show threadAndThisIsMrsPeacock 🏳‍🌈Mar 5

@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.

#IT #SysAdmin #DatacenterLife

Show threadRootWyrm 🇺🇦Mar 5

@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.

Show threadDunwich Type FoundersMar 5
@digitalraven this is how AI solves climate change. If enough people die carbon output will drop.
Show threadmortMar 5

@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.

Show threadLarryMar 5
@digitalraven
I can see the BOINC,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing , or similar, becoming more popular.
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - Wikipedia

Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Mar 5
@digitalraven
Don’t worry. When ChatGPT goes broke there’ll be loads of cheap RAM as the insolvency firm tries to monetise the assets.
Show threadRichard BairwellMar 5
@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.
Show threadKim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Mar 8
@rbairwell
I wonder how much of the contracted RAM production has actually been soldered down so far?
Show threadHaywood JabuzoffMar 5

@digitalraven yep. 😞😡

For our medical imaging researchers, I ordered a ~$60k server in October. The same config quoted yesterday is ~$127k.

Show threadManuXMar 5
@digitalraven LLM or American oligarchs?
Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 5
@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.
Show threadAnthonyMar 5
@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.
Show threadEveryday CyborgMar 5
@adx We are seeing similar, quote lifetime is down as well as prices being up.