Ex-Twitter dev reminisces about finding 700 unused Nvidia GPUs after takeover — forgotten cluster was 'powered on and idle'
An engineer who worked at Twitter during the seismic Agrawal-Musk transition has been publicly reminiscing about finding a cluster of 700 Nvidia V100 GPUs. Tim Zaman, who now works as a software engineer at Google DeepMind, discovered this significant chunk of GPU power to be powered up but idle in the data center of X’s chirpy ancestor.
A few weeks post Twitter-acquisition in 2022 we found 700 V100 gpus (pcie, lol) in the datacenter.They were powered on and idle, and had been for ages: the forgotten remains of a honest attempt to make a cluster within Twitter 1.0.Haha how times have changed! 100k gpus on the… https://t.co/zSChG0BvVZJuly 22, 2024
The warm humming mass of Nvidia silicon and PCBs in the Twitter data center was poetically described as “the forgotten remains of an honest attempt to make a cluster within Twitter 1.0” by Zaman in a Twitter/X post on Monday. The engineer had been spurred to write about his surprise discovery of this silicon treasure trove after reading about xAI’s Memphis Supercluster getting to work training Grok 3, powered by 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 accelerators on a single RDMA fabric.
Zaman underlined what many of you will be thinking – Twitter had 700 of the world's most powerful GPUs humming along without purpose for years. “How times have changed!” he exclaimed. Indeed, the first Nvidia Volta architecture V100 GPUs for data centers started to arrive in the market during the first great GPU shortage of 2017, and Zaman found the 700x V100 card-powered cluster running without purpose in mid-2022. That’s a lot of computing time and resources wasted.
