Benchmarking 15 “E-Waste” GPUs with Modern Workloads

Decommissioned NVIDIA enterprise GPUs are one of the last remaining sources of idle VRAM. K80 with 24GB of GDDR5 sells for $60, P100-16GB for around $75 and V100-16GB for under $200. Shortcomings and all, it’s important to understand if we can utilize these widely available cards in the modern era. This project to benchmark tesla GPUs has been in the works for almost a year and over the winter I was able to spend many kilowatt hours heating up my studio with GPUs.

 

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Saving a Secondhand Tripod

There are several semi-professional thrifters in my life that regularly rotate through the different Goodwill stores in our city prowling for deals. Their habit exposes me to a bit of second hand second hand shopping, and I always request camera equipment. Above is the current state of the tripod pile.

Often times these donated tripods don’t come fitted with their adapter plates for attaching to cameras. This nominally terminal condition is easily recoverable in the age of 3D printing.

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Introducing a GPU Server Benchmark for Tesla GPUs

Previously a plan was set in motion to benchmark my collection of mighty Tesla GPUs. The set of cooler manifolds are designed, a GPU server benchmark suite has been created, and the time has come to start working through the spreadsheet. I have long suspected that the older multi node cards could be fantastic for image processing. Finally we can quantify how much life is left in these older cards.

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