Installing linux on old hw is helpful. I got lucky and hoarded a few hundred GB of RAM before prices went up.

> How are you getting ready?

Finding out how to make the best use of the large amount of DDR3 RAM I have.

Those Chinese C612-based boards for the E5-2696v3, et al. (which support DDR3 and DDR4) seem OK with the custom BIOSen out there.

build the biggest beowulf cluster you can!