On Tuesday, the US General Services Administration started an public sale for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, positioned in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34-petaflop supercomputer ranked because the twentieth strongest on this planet on the time of its set up in 2016. Bidding began at $2,500, but it surely’s value is presently $27,643 with the reserve not but met.
The supercomputer, which formally operated between January 12, 2017, and December 31, 2023, on the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, was a highly effective and energy-efficient system that considerably superior atmospheric and Earth system sciences analysis.
“In its lifetime, Cheyenne delivered over 7 billion core-hours, served over 4,400 customers, and supported almost 1,300 NSF awards,” writes the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on its official Cheyenne info web page. “It performed a key position in schooling, supporting greater than 80 college programs and coaching occasions. Nearly 1,000 initiatives had been awarded for early-career graduate college students and postdocs. Perhaps most tellingly, Cheyenne-powered analysis generated over 4,500 peer-review publications, dissertations and theses, and different works.”
UCAR says that Cheynne was initially slated to get replaced after 5 years, however the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted provide chains, and it clocked in two additional years in its tour of obligation. The public sale web page says that Cheyenne lately skilled upkeep limitations due to defective fast disconnects in its cooling system. As a consequence, roughly 1 p.c of the compute nodes have failed, primarily due to ECC errors within the DIMMs. Given the expense and downtime related to repairs, the choice was made to public sale off the parts.
With a peak efficiency of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops), this SGI ICE XA system was able to performing over 3 billion calculations per second for each watt of power consumed, making it thrice extra energy-efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone. The system featured 4,032 dual-socket nodes, every with two 18-core, 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, for a whole of 145,152 CPU cores. It additionally included 313 terabytes of reminiscence and 40 petabytes of storage. The complete system in operation consumed about 1.7 megawatts of energy.
Just to evaluate, the world’s top-rated supercomputer in the mean time—Frontier at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee—options a theoretical peak efficiency of 1,679.82 petaflops per second, contains 8,699,904 CPU cores, and makes use of 22.7 megawatts of energy.
The GSA notes that potential consumers of Cheyenne must be conscious that skilled movers with acceptable gear shall be required to deal with the heavy racks and parts. The public sale contains seven E-Cell pairs (14 whole), every with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Each E-Cell weighs roughly 1,500 lbs. Additionally, the public sale options two air-cooled Cheyenne Management Racks, every weighing 2,500 lbs, that comprise servers, switches, and energy models.
As of this writing, 12 potential consumers have bid on this computing monster to this point. The public sale closes on May 5 at 6:11 pm Central Time when you’re desirous about bidding. But do not get too excited by images of the in depth cabling: As the public sale website notes, “fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling are excluded from the resale bundle.”
