According to recent reports, the retired Cheyenne supercomputer from the U.S. General Services Administration was sold to an anonymous buyer for $480,085 (approximately RMB 3.466 million at current rates). (On May 3rd, The author published an article on 2024 Bid Now: US Supercomputer Cheyenne Sale from $2500!)
Installed in 2016, Cheyenne was ranked the 20th fastest supercomputer in the world at the time, with a peak performance of 5.34 petaflops. The auction started at a price of $2,500 (approximately RMB 18,100 at current rates).
The supercomputer was officially launched on January 12, 2017, and was decommissioned on December 31, 2023. It played a crucial role at the Wyoming-based National Center for Atmospheric Research Supercomputing Center, providing strong and efficient computing power for research in atmospheric and Earth system sciences.
During its service, Cheyenne operated for over 7 billion core hours, serving more than 4,400 users and supporting nearly 1,300 projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research noted that it “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 generated over 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and other works.”
Due to severe supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Cheyenne’s original five-year service period was extended by two years. The auction page notes that due to a quick breaker failure in its cooling system, Cheyenne recently encountered maintenance issues, leading to the failure of approximately 1% of its compute nodes, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Considering the maintenance costs and downtime, the U.S. government decided to auction off its components.
The SGI ICE XA system has a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops) and can execute over 3 billion computations per watt, making it three times more energy-efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone. The system consists of 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each with two 18-core 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors, totaling 145,152 CPU cores, with 313 TB of memory and 40 PB of storage. The entire system draws 1.7 MW of power when running.
In comparison, the world’s current top-ranked supercomputer, Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops, with 8,699,904 CPU cores and a power draw of 22.7 MW.
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