Need to Purchase a Decommissioned Supercomputer? This is Your Probability

On Tuesday, the US Common Companies Administration started an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, situated in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34-petaflop supercomputer ranked because the 20th most powerful on this planet on the time of its set up in 2016. Bidding began at $2,500, however its worth is at present $270,085.

The supercomputer, which formally operated between January 12, 2017, and December 31, 2023, on the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, was a strong (and as soon as thought of 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 practically 1,300 NSF awards,” writes the College Company for Atmospheric Analysis (UCAR) on its official Cheyenne information page. “It performed a key position in schooling, supporting greater than 80 college programs and coaching occasions. Practically 1,000 initiatives have been awarded for early-career graduate college students and postdocs. Maybe 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 responsibility. The public sale web page says that Cheyenne just lately skilled upkeep limitations resulting from defective fast disconnects in its cooling system. Because of this, roughly 1 p.c of the compute nodes have failed, primarily resulting from ECC errors within the DIMMs. Given the expense and downtime related to repairs, the choice was made to public sale off the elements.

With a peak efficiency of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops), this SGI ICE XA system was able to performing greater than Three billion calculations per second for each watt of power consumed, making it 3 times 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 complete of 145,152 CPU cores. It additionally included 313 TB of reminiscence and 40 petabytes of storage. The complete system in operation consumed about 1.7 megawatts of energy.

Simply to check, the world’s top-rated supercomputer in the mean time—Frontier at Oak Ridge Nationwide Labs in Tennessee—includes a theoretical peak efficiency of 1,679.82 petaflops, consists of 8,699,904 CPU cores, and makes use of 22.7 megawatts of energy.

The GSA notes that potential patrons of Cheyenne must be conscious that skilled movers with applicable gear will probably be required to deal with the heavy racks and elements. The public sale consists of seven E-Cell pairs (14 complete), every with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Every E-Cell weighs roughly 1,500 kilos. Moreover, the public sale options two air-cooled Cheyenne Administration Racks, every weighing 2,500 kilos, that comprise servers, switches, and energy models.

As of this writing, 23 potential patrons have bid on this computing monster up to now. The public sale closes on Could Three at 6:11 pm Central Time when you’re all in favour of bidding. However do not get too excited by photographs of the intensive cabling: Because the public sale web site notes, “fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling are excluded from the resale bundle.”

This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.