On Tuesday, the US General Services Administration got started Auction for people who stop working Supercomputer Cheyenne, located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34 petaflop supercomputer is classified as a supercomputer 20th strongest in the world at the time of installation in 2016. Bidding started at $2,500, but its price is now $270,085.
The supercomputer officially operates from January 12, 2017 to December 31, 2023 at NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Centeris a powerful (and once considered energy-efficient) system that has greatly advanced scientific research on Earth’s and atmospheric systems.
The University Consortium for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) writes on its official Cheyenne: “Over its lifetime, Cheyenne has delivered more than 7 billion core hours, served more than 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 NSF Award”. infomation page. “It plays a vital role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training events. Nearly 1,000 projects have been awarded to graduate students and early-career postdocs . Perhaps most notable, the research provided by Cheyenne has produced more than 4,500 publications, peer-reviewed theses and dissertations, and other works.”
UCAR said the Cheynne was initially expected to be replaced after five years, but the Covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted the supply chain and it had to be extended for another two years in its mission life. . The auction site says the Cheyenne recently experienced maintenance limitations due to a faulty quick disconnect in its cooling system. As a result, approximately 1% of compute nodes fail, mainly due to ECC errors in DIMMs. Due to the costs and downtime associated with the repairs, the decision was made to auction the parts.
With peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflop), this one SGI ICE XA The system is capable of performing more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, making it three times more energy efficient than its predecessor, yellow stone. The system has 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each with two 18-core, 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, for a total of 145,152 CPU cores. It also includes 313 TB of memory and 40 petabytes of storage. The entire operating system consumes about 1.7 MW of electricity.
Just for comparison, world highest rated supercomputer right now-Border at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee—has a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops, includes 8,699,904 CPU cores, and uses 22.7 megawatts of power.
GSA notes that potential buyers of the Cheyenne should be aware that professional movers with the proper equipment are required to handle heavy racks and components. The auction includes seven pairs of E-Cells (14 total), each with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Each E-Cell weighs approximately 1,500 pounds. Also included in the auction are two air-cooled Cheyenne Management Racks, each weighing 2,500 pounds, containing servers, switches and power supplies.
As of this writing, 23 potential buyers have so far placed bids on this computing monster. The auction ends on May 3 at 6:11 pm Central Time if you are interested in bidding. But don’t get too excited about the photos of the extensive cabling: As the auction site notes, “fiber optic cable and CAT5/6 cabling are not included in the resale package.”
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
