The US General Services Administration has started an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Cheyenne supercomputer, with a capacity of 5.34 petaflops, was ranked as the 20th most powerful in the world at the time of its installation in 2016. The bidding started at $2,500, but the price has currently reached $27,643, with the reserve not yet met.
The Cheyenne supercomputer was operational between January 12, 2017, and December 31, 2023, at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. It was a powerful system that significantly advanced atmospheric and Earth system sciences research. Over its lifetime, Cheyenne delivered over 7 billion core hours, served over 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 NSF awards. It played a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training events. Nearly 1,000 projects were awarded for early-career graduate students and postdocs. Cheyenne-powered research generated over 4,500 peer-review publications, dissertations and theses, and other works.
The supercomputer was originally slated to be replaced after five years, but the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted supply chains and it clocked in two extra years in its tour of duty. The auction page says that Cheyenne recently experienced maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects in its cooling system. As a result, approximately 1 percent of the compute nodes have failed, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Given the expense and downtime associated with repairs, the decision was made to auction off the components.
The Cheyenne supercomputer was built by Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI) and featured 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. With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops, this SGI ICE XA system was capable of performing over 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, making it three times more energy-efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone.
Read more at: arstechnica.com