Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server.

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

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@retro.pizza]

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

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

If there were any justice, Sam Altman's impact on the world would be measured in mass graves.

[fuzzygroup@ruby.social]

@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?

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

@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.

[mikebabcock@floss.social]

@fuzzygroup @digitalraven this is not one vendor. Everything in RAM and solid state storage is basically sold out.

[craignicol@glasgow.social]

@digitalraven hospitals need fire. It's the only thing that destroys pathogens and parasites.

[burnoutqueen@todon.nl]

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

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

[fluffykittycat@furry.engineer]

@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?

[anachronistjohn@zia.io]

@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.

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

@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.

[anachronistjohn@zia.io]

@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.

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

@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.

[woody@pleroma.pch.net]

@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.

[andthisismrspeacock@mas.to]

@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

[dunwichtype@typo.social]

@digitalraven this is how AI solves climate change. If enough people die carbon output will drop.

[mort@floss.social]

@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.

[naturepunk@ecoevo.social]

@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 :(

[digitalraven@retro.pizza]

@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.