DumpsterCluster: From Dumpster Diving to Serving LLaMA-70B on $60 GPUs
As AI datacenters retire functional GPUs, vast quantities of still capable accelerators enter secondary markets. This paper investigates whether these retired GPUs can find a productive afterlife to form a DumpsterCluster that can serve modern LLM inference, and under what conditions such repurposing is economically viable and environmentally sustainable. We physically built a 128-GPU DumpsterCluster from scratch using only second-hand components and ran it for one year. At current market prices (\$22K for the DumpsterCluster vs. \$600K for an 8-GPU B200 system), the economic advantages are substantial. Through pipeline-parallel optimizations, our V100 based DumpsterCluster achieves compe...
| Authors | Zeyu Cao, Xuan Guo, Cheng Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 July 2026 |
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