Cheyenne supercomputer sold in USA

The US General Services Administration has put up for auction the Cheyenne supercomputer, launched in 2016.

About the Cheyenne supercomputer

The Cheyenne is a water-cooled setup consisting of 28-rack SGI ICE XA modules housing 8064 2.3GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors. The main system is distributed over 4032 nodes with two sockets.

With a maximum performance of 5340 teraflops, the system is capable of performing more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed. The Cheyenne also includes 313TB of memory, 40PB of storage, and 313,344GB of DDR4-2400 ECC RAM.

It is noted that the supercomputer consumes about 1.727 MW of power. This means that when running complex simulations, the power consumption will cost more than $4,000 per day.

Reason for sale

The US General Services Administration says the Cheynne was originally scheduled to be replaced after 5 years, but the COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted supply chains, extending its service life an additional 2 years.

The auction page describes how the company recently faced maintenance restrictions on the Cheynne due to faulty rapid shutdowns in the cooling system. As a result, approximately 1% of compute nodes failed, primarily due to ECC errors in DIMMs. Given the costs and downtime associated with repairs, the decision was made to auction the components.

About the cost

Bidding started at $2,500, but it is currently priced at $27,643 with reserves yet to be met. It is worth noting that fiber optic cables and CAT5/6 cables are not included in the package.