Miners are stopping the search for alien life

[Sir Eddingtons]

BBC posted an article detailing how miners buying and spiking the price of graphics cards is stopping radio telescopes from being upgraded. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43056744

[iRileyx]

Surely a facility like that would go to the newest Quadro's and/or Titan V's if they were to upgrade their GPU's?

 

Which aren't (I'm assuming for Titans as only Nvidia sell them and they're £3k, and who's gonna pay £7k for a quadro mining card?) affected by mining.

Sounds like some fake news to me.

[Enderman]

Yeah sure, radio telescopes definitely need those consumer GTX1060s.

[AshleyAshes]

6 minutes ago, RKRiley said:

Surely a facility like that would go to the newest Quadro's and/or Titan V's if they were to upgrade their GPU's?

 

Which aren't (I'm assuming for Titans as only Nvidia sell them and they're £3k, and who's gonna pay £7k for a quadro mining card?) affected by mining.

Sounds like some fake news to me.

 

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Yeah sure, radio telescopes definitely need those consumer GTX1060s.

Hi, here, enjoy this three year old Blog post about HERA receiving a Titan X to use in computations from nVidias GPU grant program.  More over, this not only shows that HERA uses consumer hardware but that nVidia is even GRANTING consumer hardware for academic purposes.

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/academic_gpu_seeding

 

From nVidia's own page, they are currently offering consumer Titan Xp's among other hardware as academic grants.

[thorsong]

Looking at the prices they quoted for what they were going to buy, it looks like they were planning on buying a number of Vega56 cards. In their situation, they are buying cards based on compute power for rendering and performing calculations.

RkRiley is probably right, they should be buying the Radeon Pro stuff, or quadro. However, they have probably deemed that the extra expense for workstation class hardware just isn't worth it. Being funded as a University project, they can't just blow money on the pro stuff when the consumer hardware will do the job.

[Canada EH]

thats a clickbait fake news article

 

[Daniel644]

even if they found shit they would never tell us

[Canada EH]

5 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

even if they found shit they would never tell us

Neil deGrass Tyson would tell his!

[GSTARR]

53 minutes ago, RKRiley said:

Surely a facility like that would go to the newest Quadro's and/or Titan V's if they were to upgrade their GPU's?

 

Which aren't (I'm assuming for Titans as only Nvidia sell them and they're £3k, and who's gonna pay £7k for a quadro mining card?) affected by mining.

Sounds like some fake news to me.

Could have sworn a while back I saw a quad titan setup for mining

[Canada EH]

they can afford to pay a premium if they really need them that much

 

I call BS on the news article!!

[Centurius]

1 hour ago, RKRiley said:

Surely a facility like that would go to the newest Quadro's and/or Titan V's if they were to upgrade their GPU's?

 

Which aren't (I'm assuming for Titans as only Nvidia sell them and they're £3k, and who's gonna pay £7k for a quadro mining card?) affected by mining.

Sounds like some fake news to me.

With the budget space exploration and science in general is getting the past 20 or so years? They need to cut corners wherever they can. If they can save money by going consumer hardware that can be the difference between upgrading this year or a decade from now.

[Andreas Lilja]

Good, they'd probably kill us.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, Canada EH said:

they can afford to pay a premium if they really need them that much

 

I call BS on the news article!!

Money wasn't the big issue, they contacted vendors and they simply did not have the GPUs. Sometimes it just doesn't matter if you walk up with a bucket of cash, it won't get you what you want always.

 

Going by the article and using math they want to buy 64 GPUs, doesn't say which but we all know right now sourcing 64 of the same GPU from a single supplier is impossible.

[Canada EH]

True, buying wholesale there is a wait no doubt.