What was once the 21st most powerful supercomputer in the world is now available to the highest bidder — well, maybe, as the current bid of under $30,000 has not met the required amount. The U.S. General Services Administration opted to put the Cheyenne supercomputer, deployed in 2016, up for auction, in part due to ongoing repair and maintenance problems.
The retired supercomputer is, as the name suggests, a monster. It’s a 5.34 petaflops system, one of the last deployed by Silicon Graphics International after its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard. Since then, it's been a cornerstone of operations at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The Cheyenne supercomputer is a water-controlled installation made up of SGI ICE XA modules with 28 racks holding 8,064 Intel E5-2697v4 CPUs. That totals 145,152 cores, for those keeping count. The main system is spread across 4,032 dual-socket nodes. Here are the specs of the primary components:
| Component | Quantity |
|---|---|
| E-cells (1500 lbs. each) | 14 |
| E-racks (water-cooled) | 28 |
| Intel E5-2697v4 CPUs | 8,064 |
| DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank memory | 313,344GB |
| IB Switches | 224 |
| Air-cooled management racks | 2 (see below for specs) |
Each E-Cell weighs in at 1,500 pounds, and shipping is not included in the winning bid. The purchaser will need to hire a professional moving company to transport the supercomputer from the facility to its new home. The auction notes also state that the supercomputer will be sold as-is, and that it "is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray." Not exactly the pinnacle of supercomputing achievements, then.
Beyond the above hardware, the supercomputer also includes two air-cooled management racks. These consist of 26 1U servers each, 20 of which have 128GB of memory and six with 256GB of memory. That's an additional 8TB of DRAM, if you're wondering. The management racks also include 10 Extreme Switches, and two Extreme Switch power units, and each rack weighs 2,500 pounds.
While the Cheyenne supercomputer has been in operation for the past seven years, the auction notes says the "expense and downtime associated with" fixing the current cooling problems makes it unworthy of continued maintenance. And of course, even though this was a lightning-fast supercomputer when it first launched, it would be considered sluggish by 2024 computing standards. This is a fate shared by many supercomputers, even some of NASA's most powerful ones.
Cheyenne peaked at number 21 on the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers back when it launched. Today, it sits at number 160 — based on an Rmax score of 4.79 petaflops. The paradigm shift to GPU-powered supercomputers over the past decade means that, as an example, you could potentially exceed that level of performance with around 23 Nvidia DGX H100 systems sporting 46 CPUs and 184 GPUs.
Even so, the auction comes with a treasure trove of parts and components for whoever is willing to pony up the cash. The supercomputer will be drained for removal, and it seems it won't necessarily include all the necessary cabling. However, it does include a whopping 313,344GB of DDR4-2400 ECC RAM. That alone could be worth more than $350,000 — not to mention an unspecified amount of storage.
Also of interest is that the supercomputer uses around 1.727 MW of power when fully assembled. Which means that if you want to power it up and run complex simulations on it, the power requirements could cost over $4,000 per day (depending on the price of electricity, naturally).
We presume most bidders would be more interested in parting out the system rather than attempting to get it running again. Besides the missing Ethernet and optical cabling that you'd need to acquire, there's the apparently unresolved issue of the leaking quick-connect liquid cooling components. But who knows? Maybe some enterprising business will find a way to bring Cheyenne back into service, like a phoenix rising from the water-logged ashes.
Updated: Bidding is scheduled to end on May 3, 2024 and is up to $28,085 $120,085 now. There's no longer a "reserve not met" disclaimer, which apparently means someone is going hope with several truckloads of old supercomputer parts. Whether the buyer will try to fix up the system and get it running, sell it for parts, or just grind it up for the raw materials remains to be seen.
