The U.S. General Services Administration began auctioning off the retired supercomputer “Cheyenne” this Tuesday, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. When installed in 2016, it was the 20th most powerful supercomputer in the world, with a peak performance of 5.34 petaflops. The starting bid was $2,500, currently around 18,100 RMB, and the current bid stands at $27,643, around 200,000 RMB, but it hasn’t reached the reserve price yet.
This supercomputer was officially launched on January 12, 2017, and was retired on December 31, 2023. It played a significant role at the Wyoming National Center for Atmospheric Research Supercomputing Center, providing powerful and efficient computing capabilities for atmospheric and earth system science research.
During its service, “Cheyenne” ran for more than 7 billion core hours, served over 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 projects funded by the National Science Foundation. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research wrote on its official information page: “It also played a key role in education, supporting over 80 university courses and training activities. Nearly 1,000 projects have been awarded to early-career graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Most notably, research supported by ‘Cheyenne’ has produced more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and other works.”
Due to the severe supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, “Cheyenne,” originally planned to serve for five years, was extended by two years. The auction page shows that due to a cooling system circuit breaker failure, “Cheyenne” recently encountered maintenance restrictions, leading to failures in about 1% of computing nodes, mainly due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Considering the maintenance costs and downtime, the U.S. government decided to auction its components.
This SGI ICE XA system has a peak performance of 5340 teraflops (4788 Linpack teraflops) and can perform over 3 billion computations per watt, making it three times more efficient than its predecessor, “Yellowstone.” The system has 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each equipped with two 18-core, 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, for a total of 145,152 CPU cores, and also has 313 TB of memory and 40 PB of storage space. The entire system consumes 1.7 megawatts of power when running.
In contrast, the world’s current number one supercomputer, “Frontier,” located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops, with 8,699,904 CPU cores, and consumes 22.7 megawatts of power.
| 145,152 processor cores | 2.3-GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697V4 (Broadwell) processors 16 flops per clock |
| 4,032 computation nodes | Dual-socket nodes, 18 cores per socket |
| 6 login nodes | Dual-socket nodes, 18 cores per socket 256 GB memory/node |
| 313 TB total system memory | 64 GB/node on 3,168 nodes, DDR4-2400 128 GB/node on 864 nodes, DDR4-2400 |
| Mellanox EDR InfiniBand high-speed interconnect | Partial 9D Enhanced Hypercube single-plane interconnect topology Bandwidth: 25 GBps bidirectional per link Latency: MPI ping-pong < 1 µs; hardware link 130 ns |
| > 3.5 times Yellowstone’s peak performance | Comparison based on the relative performance of CISL High Performance Computing Benchmarks run on each system. |
| Comparison based on the relative performance of CISL High-Performance Computing Benchmarks run on each system. | 5.34 peak petaflops (vs. 1.504) |
The U.S. General Services Administration reminded potential buyers that moving these bulky racks and components requires professional movers and the proper equipment. The auction includes seven pairs of electronic units (a total of 14), each with a Cooling Distribution Unit (CDU). Each electronic unit weighs about 1,500 pounds. Additionally, there are two air-cooled “Cheyenne” management racks, each weighing up to 2,500 pounds, containing servers, switches, and power supplies.
So far, 12 potential buyers have bid on this massive computer, and the auction will end on May 5 at 6:11 p.m. Central U.S. time. However, the auction website also reminds everyone that fiber optic and CAT5/6 wiring are not included in the auction package.
Related:
- China’s 192M Core Supercomputer Shatters Expectations!
- US Government ‘Cheyenne’ Supercomputer Fetches $480K
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