The Nvidia slides had it at $129,000 a pop

Wow, cheap, great for startups!

As of last year prices for general HPC resources were running around $3/GFLOP[1], or about $500,000 for 170TFlops if my math is correct.

Sounds like this is a significant cost savings if it fits your use case.

Uh, using what hardware? The 980 Ti is about 11 TFLOP in half-precision (apples to apples). So 16x 980 Ti cards would take up twice as much rack space for $11k. Your estimate (and NVIDIA's pricing) is off by more than an order of magnitude...

A 980 Ti doesn't have FP16 hardware. The only Maxwell based component with such support is their Tegra part.

Isn't the ECC tax around 10x?

So, just do the computation twice and compare the results?

OK, so there's twice the power to pay for but it seems like at $129k acquisition cost per 3.2KW consumption you could run for tens of years before break-even.

I'll take 5