Cheyenne, an American supercomputer once ranked 20th in the world with 8,000 Intel Xeon CPUs and 300 TB of RAM (plus a few maintenance issues, including water leaks), was recently auctioned by the US General Services Administration (GSA).
After a tussle among 27 bidders, Cheyenne went for a respectable $480,085, plus the costs of disassembly and moving to its new home.
If you’re itching to own a supercomputer but your pockets aren’t that deep, or if you’d rather have a computer that isn’t a fixer-upper, Supermicro has you covered.
Value for your money
As noted by ServeTheHome, Supermicro is selling complete Intel Gaudi 2 servers for $90,000. Pricing for AI servers isn’t normally advertised, so it’s interesting to see this promotion that reads (somewhat awkwardly): “Supermicro and Intel have teamed up for special pricing on a Gaudi 2 GPU server.”
Do you want to know what you get for your money? This “special configuration” (SYS-820GH-TNR2-01) includes one Supermicro Gaudi 2 system, which includes eight Habana Gaudi-2 OAM Mezz cards (8U), two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 processors, 16x 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC RDIMM, two 960 GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 (M.2), two 7.6 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 (U.2), one NIC, CX-6 VPI (IB/EN), 100G, Dual Port QSFP56, System Management Software Suite Node License and eight Intel Gaudi 2 OCP OAM Spec v1.3 with heat sink.
If this does not quite meet your needs, or if you would like to benefit from a discount, you can configure your own Supermicro Gaudi 2 Server, choosing the components you need. However, for pricing you will need to speak to Supermicro directly.
Intel launched Gaudi 3 in April 2024, so you won’t get the latest hardware. ServeTheHome broke down some of the cost of the advertised server, noting: “The interesting thing about this is that it still uses an Ice Lake Xeon platform, so on PCIe Gen4 and cheaper DDR4 memory. The list price for the Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 processors is $7214 each. Those 64GB DIMMs typically cost around $3000-$3200 for 16 in new systems. There’s probably another $1500-2000 in SSD content and a bit more for the NVIDIA ConenctX-6 VPI NIC. We only have one of those NICs because Gaudi 2 uses its onboard 100GbE network directly from the AI accelerators.”