Do you want your very own supercomputer? Well, you just missed your shot. However, someone out there is the proud owner of a new (to them) government supercomputer known as Cheyenne. This machine at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center was once among the fastest computers in the world, but it was retired earlier this year when maintenance issues made it more trouble than it was worth. The new owner paid a bargain price of $480,085, but they are responsible for moving the 26,000 pounds of equipment that makes up Cheyenne.
In all, 27 different bidders vied to get their hands on Cheyenne through the US General Services Administration (GSA) auction. The unidentified winner gets most of the hardware associated with the 5.34-petaflop machine, which is built on SGI ICE XA modules. There are 28 racks with a total of 8,064 Intel E5-2697v4 CPUs—that works out to an impressive 145,152 processor cores. The machine is split into 14 E-Cells, each weighing 1,500 pounds. The machine also has 313,344 GB of DDR4-2400 ECC memory.
The government says technicians will bundle up internal DAC cabling and secure the management racks, which themselves weigh a few thousand pounds, but that's all the help the buyer will get. The buyer doesn't get the Ethernet cables, though. The government will require a professional moving company to retrieve the hardware from the SuperComputing Center in Cheyenne, WY, which could add considerably to the cost.
Even with all that done, the buyer won't have a functional supercomputer straight away. The GSA offers no warranty on the machine, and there are real risks to flipping the switch. Cheyenne's processing racks are water-cooled, but the system is in need of significant maintenance. The GSA notes there are multiple faulty quick disconnects that spray water when pressurized. The ECC memory was failing at an increasing rate over the last few months of operation. Finally, Cheyenne doesn't come with any storage—the SuperComputing Center will hold onto that.
It's possible that the new owner doesn't actually want a supercomputer. Instead, they might simply want to dismantle the machine and sell the parts individually. According to Tom's Hardware, each CPU could sell for $50 and the sticks of RAM could fetch as much as $65. Parting the supercomputer out could earn the owner around $700,000, which is a healthy profit, provided the transportation cost isn't too out of hand. Building Cheyenne probably cost around $25 million in 2016.
It's possible we will soon see a glut of Xeon CPUs and ECC memory on eBay. While Cheyenne was objectively fast with 5.34 petaflops of compute, it didn't have staying power. It debuted at number 21 on the Top500 list when it came online in 2016, but it fell quickly as interest in HPC and AI picked up. When it was shut down, Cheyenne was at number 160 on that list. Most organizations looking for a high-performance computing platform are leaning into AI acceleration now, for which Cheyenne is ill-equipped.
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