A US supercomputer with 8,000 Intel
The Cheyenne supercomputer, based at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was ranked the twentieth most powerful computer in the world in 2016, but is now available for purchase through the US General Services Administration (GSA).
By November 2023, the 5.34-petaflops system’s ranking had fallen to 160th in the world, but it is still a monster that can perform 5.34 quadrillion calculations per second. It has been used for a number of notable purposes in the past, including studying weather phenomena and predicting natural disasters.
The Cheyenne Supercomputer is a monster rig consisting of SGI ICE There are 8,064 Intel “Broadwell” Xeon processors (18-core 2.3GHz E5-2697v4) with a total number of 145,152 cores. In terms of memory, it has 313,344 GB DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank memory and 224 IB switches. The supercomputer also comes with two air-cooled management racks, each with 26 1U servers.
“Repairable”
However, potential buyers must be aware of a number of things. Firstly, the unit does not come with fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling, although the internal DAC cables are present in each cell and will be “carefully labeled and boxed”, and it comes with previously used PGW coolant (about 10 gallons per E-cell). It must be picked up by a professional moving company and the buyer “assumes responsibility for transferring the racks from the facility to trucks using their equipment.”
A major red flag is that the supercomputer is worryingly listed as “repairable.” The auction page states: “The system is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick couplings causing water spray. Given the cost and downtime associated with resolving this issue over the past six months, this is considered more damaging than the expected compute node failure rate.
Approximately 1% of nodes experienced an outage during this period, mainly attributed to DIMMs with ECC errors, which will remain unrepaired. In addition, the system will undergo coolant drain.”
With just a few days to go before the auction ends, the bid currently stands at $50,085, with the reserve not yet reached. If you want to buy a piece of supercomputing history and have the deep pockets needed to get it up and running, as well as the space to house it, you can make an offer here.