If they are price fixing, eff them.

Finally secure a research grant and had budgeted money for a new compute workstation and the RAM prices are killing my budget, because I'd love to get at least 256 GB of RAM and that's 4-5 grand now. Ridiculous, especially since I'd like to have a GPU in it with at least 32Gb of VRAM for medical image model training, so that is also like 4-5 grand too.

Do I wait two years and hope, or pay, isthe question I keep asking myself.

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jscyc 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If you don't have anything that requires an air gapped system your funds would go a lot further joining a HPC system if you have one available at your institution.

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woadwarrior01 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This isn't the first time they've been caught doing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

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mdorazio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why can't you train with a cloud service?

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SubiculumCode 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's possibility that I've considered, am still considering. Mostly because I am used to working locally, but also because I am not sure which works out cheapest in the end. For my use cases, if I need anything with more than 24 or 32 GB, it definitely makes sense to rent I thing. Those cards are extra pricy. Also, I keep the GPU and analysis computer for the lab after the grant ends, but I don't keep my budget for online conpute..that would go back to the Federal government, so it makes sense for some level of hardware to be around for lean times

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doc_ick 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s not necessarily private then, and billing changes based on whims.

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riedel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

At least in Europe we are building a common super-computer infrastructure exactly for this. Tier 0 (EuroHPC) to tier 3 (University clusters) now have considerable amount of GPU (both due to demand, but also since classical CPU-heavy FLOPs have becime even more expensive due to RAM prices). Our system will be in a ISO 27001 / TISAX level 3 scope (rather relevant for engineering). The system work up to a PUE of 1.1 and will also solve part of heating decarbonization problem. We need souvereignity in research. But we at least in research we do not need each lab buying their own workstations anymore. The systems are actually also now also offered to start-ups and small enterprises that don't have the capex/opex for efficient and secure compute themselves.

	▲	SubiculumCode 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is a third possibility, because there are Federal supportrd resources for compute, see [1]. And I can and will probably use at some point, but there is something about not having to deal with other people's systems and having that bare metal right there. [1] https://allocations.access-ci.org/resources