Comment by nullc

I have around a thousand broadwell cores in 4 socket systems that I got for ~nothing from these sorts of sources... pretty useful. (I mean, I guess literally nothing since I extracted the storage backplanes and sold them for more than the systems cost me). I try to run tasks in low power costs hours on zen3/4 unless it's gonna take weeks just running on those, and if it will I crank up the rest of the cores.

And 40 P40 GPUs that cost very little, which are a bit slow but with 24gb per gpu they're pretty useful for memory bandwidth bound tasks (and not horribly noncompetitive in terms of watts per TB/s).

Given highly variable time of day power it's also pretty useful to just get 2x the computing power (at low cost) and just run it during the low power cost periods.

So I think datacenter scrap is pretty useful.