The Cheyenne supercomputer, once the 21st most powerful supercomputer in the world, was recently auctioned off for $480,085. The auction attracted 27 bidders and ended with one lucky buyer walking away with 8,064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs and 313TB DDR4-2400 ECC RAM. However, the supercomputer did come with some issues, including water leaks due to faulty quick disconnects.
The Cheyenne supercomputer was a 5.34 petaflops system that had been in operation for seven years. During its operation, it was used by scientists across the state of Wyoming and the rest of the country for weather and climate studies. However, the high failure rate of the system, primarily attributed to DIMMs with ECC errors, and the maintenance challenges led to its sale.
Despite the issues, a savvy eBay seller could potentially flip the processors and RAM for around $700,000, making a hefty profit. However, this estimate assumes all of the CPUs and RAM sticks work, which may not be the case given the disclosed failure rate.
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