[Const-me]

> anything you’re going to build and run at home will be a small-scale replica.

If you’re OK with the performance of a top-tanking 2010 supercomputer, and the task is a good fit for GPUs (=the numbers being crunched are single-precision floats, not too much bandwidth is required, the “hot” set of the data is within a few GB i.e. fits in VRAM), you can build one at home spending very reasonable amount of cash.

Here’s a top 500 list for June 2010: https://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/ As you see, the system at #10 delivers 433 TFlops. That’s just 40 modern GeForce 1080Ti GPUs. What once costed many millions of dollars and consumed 4 megawatts of electricity, now costs $40k and consumes little over 10KW.

And because cryptocurrency craziness, many-GPU motherboards, cables, PSUs and other components are available on the market and aren’t too expensive. For example, Asus offers B250 mining motherboard with 19 PCIe slots for $140.