There is on eBay UK at the minute a Sun E6500 with 12 x 400 MHz
processors and 12 GB 0f RAM. Maxed out it can hold 30 CPUs.

Starting price is £500, which does not seem bad to me. There are much
lesser Sun servers on eBay for a lot more money. Still, not everyone
wants a beast that weighs about half a tonne and uses 26 A at 240 V.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sun-Enterprise...cmdZ ViewItem

I have no connection with the seller.

--
Dave K

http://www.southminster-branch-line.org.uk/

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@domain. Hitting reply will work
for a couple of months only. Later set it manually. The month is
always written in 3 letters (e.g. Jan, not January etc)

It's a nice machine, I know, but a bit outside my price range. Plus I'd
no doubt only use 1/6 of the machine's power. I guess the remaining 5/6
can be used for boasting about, though!

Chris

On 2006-01-20 22:51:54 +0000, christopher.tidy@gmail.com said:

> It's a nice machine, I know, but a bit outside my price range. Plus I'd
> no doubt only use 1/6 of the machine's power. I guess the remaining 5/6
> can be used for boasting about, though!
>
> Chris

There was an E10K on UK Ebay recently, 24 cpus, 24gb ram - buy it now
price a mere 2399 pounds......

Steve

Steve wrote:
> On 2006-01-20 22:51:54 +0000, christopher.tidy@gmail.com said:
>
>> It's a nice machine, I know, but a bit outside my price range. Plus I'd
>> no doubt only use 1/6 of the machine's power. I guess the remaining 5/6
>> can be used for boasting about, though!
>>
>> Chris
>
>
> There was an E10K on UK Ebay recently, 24 cpus, 24gb ram - buy it now
> price a mere 2399 pounds......

It makes that E 6500 seem quite cheap really, but I suspect the market
for them is not that big.

There was once someone on eBay selling an SGI supercomputer, which
apparently cost something like $3,000,000 when new. It had a starting
price of about $750,000. Needless to say, it did not sell.


--
Dave K

http://www.southminster-branch-line.org.uk/

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@domain. Hitting reply will work
for a couple of months only. Later set it manually. The month is
always written in 3 letters (e.g. Jan, not January etc)

Dave (from the UK) wrote:

> Steve wrote:
>
>> On 2006-01-20 22:51:54 +0000, christopher.tidy@gmail.com said:
>>
>>> It's a nice machine, I know, but a bit outside my price range. Plus I'd
>>> no doubt only use 1/6 of the machine's power. I guess the remaining 5/6
>>> can be used for boasting about, though!
>>>
>>> Chris
>>
>>
>>
>> There was an E10K on UK Ebay recently, 24 cpus, 24gb ram - buy it now
>> price a mere 2399 pounds......
>
>
> It makes that E 6500 seem quite cheap really, but I suspect the market
> for them is not that big.
>
> There was once someone on eBay selling an SGI supercomputer, which
> apparently cost something like $3,000,000 when new. It had a starting
> price of about $750,000. Needless to say, it did not sell.

When the office I worked in closed last year, I got to take away a cube
van full of old gear, mostly Sun. A rough estimate suggests the load
would have cost close to $1M new. I kept the best and realised a little
over $9000 for the rest - probably could have done better if I'd
bothered with eBay and shipping, but I figured I'd be lucky to earn
minimum wage for the extra time spent.

Testing, inventorying, and marketing old kit takes time - barely worth
the effort unless you can get it very cheap in large quantities.

Sunny