IT Home reported on May 1 that the U.S. General Services Administration began auctioning off the decommissioned supercomputer "Cheyenne" (Cheyenne) on Tuesday, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The supercomputer was the 20th largest supercomputer in the world when it was installed in 2016, with a peak computing performance of 5.34 petaflops. The starting price is $2,500 (note: about 18,100 yuan at the moment), and the current auction price is $27,643 (about 200,000 yuan at the moment), which has not yet reached the reserve price.
The supercomputer, which was officially operational on January 12, 2017, and retired on December 31, 2023, plays an important role at the Supercomputing Center of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Wyoming, providing powerful and efficient computing power for atmospheric and earth system scientific research.
During its time in service, Cheyenne ran more than 7 billion core hours, served more than 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 National Science Foundation funded projects. "It also plays a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training activities," the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research wrote on its official information page. Nearly 1000 projects have been awarded to early-career graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Most notably, Cheyenne-supported research has resulted in more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and other works. ”
Due to severe supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, Cheyenne was originally planned to serve for five years, but was eventually extended by two years. The auction page shows that Cheyenne recently ran into maintenance constraints due to a cooling system fast circuit breaker failure, resulting in about 1% of compute nodes failing, mainly due to an ECC error in the DIMM. Considering the cost of repairs and downtime, the US government decided to auction off its components.
With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops) and more than 3 billion calculations per watt, the SGI ICE XA system is three times more efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone. The system has 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each equipped with two 18-core, 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, for a total of 145,152 CPU cores, as well as 313 TB of memory and 40 PB of storage. The entire system operates with a power consumption of 1.7 megawatts.
In comparison, the current number one supercomputer in the world, the "Frontier" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a theoretical peak performance of 1679.82 petaflops per second, has 8699904 CPU cores, and consumes 22.7 megawatts.
The U.S. General Services Administration reminds potential buyers that moving these bulky racks and components requires professional movers and the right equipment. This auction includes 7 pairs of electronic units (14 in total), each with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Each electronic unit weighs about 1500 pounds. Also included are two air-cooled "Cheyenne" management racks, each weighing up to 2,500 pounds, that contain servers, switches, and power supply units.
So far, 12 potential buyers have placed bids on the massive computer, and the auction will end at 6:11 p.m. CT on May 5. However, the auction website also reminds everyone that fiber and CAT5/6 cabling are not included in the auction package.