News Ex-Twitter dev reminisces about finding 700 unused Nvidia GPUs after takeover — forgotten cluster was 'powered on and idle

[Admin]

An engineer who worked at Twitter during the Agrawal-Musk transition has been reminiscing about finding an unused cluster of 700 Nvidia V100 GPUs. This significant chunk of GPU power was discovered powered up but idle in the data center of X’s chirpy ancestor.

Ex-Twitter dev reminisces about finding 700 unused Nvidia GPUs after takeover — forgotten cluster was 'powered on and idle : Read more

 

[elforeign]

How much do they consume at idle? 20w? 5w? either way, 700 of these consuming that much per hour 24/7 is a sizeable amount of power draw. Do they not look at their power bill?

 

[coromonadalix]

lol they honestly don't give a damn
a waste of energy and $$$ sitting duck pffff and now their big baby will be obsolete in 1 year loll

 

[vanadiel007]

Maybe, just maybe, they were not sitting idle all the time. Maybe they were used for crypto mining and were idling when they found them.

I highly doubt a single person would be able to purchases 700 high end GPU's and associated equipment without anybody knowing anything about them...

 

[CmdrShepard]

As for the electrical bill, this a side project in a datacenter, the power draw is just a fraction of the total and it's not like you have an expected total.

Let's say you had 8 cards per server -- that's like 88 servers which are at least 2U high if not more. That's like at minimum 4 full sized racks of equipment. With max 300W per card that should be like 3,000W PSU per server (2,400 + some slack). Multiply by 88 and that's potential peak load of 264,000 W. Even at idle, each of those servers probably pulled at least 100W (8 GPUs + CPU) which would give 8kW per hour 24/7/365.

Keep in mind that this is just a back of the napkin math and a rough estimate, but in no way that's a fraction becuase regular servers without GPUs don't pull anywhere near that peak power and pull even less at idle.

 

[Geeee123]

Crypto farm?

 

[wunshot]

I bet it was a crypto mining rig running right under their noses by some crafty developer.

 

[KyaraM]

How much do they consume at idle? 20w? 5w? either way, 700 of these consuming that much per hour 24/7 is a sizeable amount of power draw. Do they not look at their power bill?

I would guess that among all their servers and other stuff running, even that much didn't really parse or could have been attributed to other sources. Even if we say they pull 20W each idle, that's "only" 1400W. Imagine that vs several 100 server CPUs running at 300W+ under load and ask that question again. It likely wasn't more than a blip on the radar, if even that much.

 

[bill001g]

The headlines said twitter cut 80% of the staff when musk took over. Could have easily been they cut the whole team including any manager that knew about it.

Likely there is lots of abandon projects that currently employees are afraid to shut off because they don't know what they do.