Gamingdeputy reported on May 1 that the U.S. General Services Administration began auctioning the retired supercomputer “Cheyenne” located in Cheyenne, Wyoming on Tuesday.This supercomputer was the 20th largest supercomputer in the world when it was installed in 2016, with a peak computing performance of 5.34 petaflops. The starting price is US$2,500 (Gamingdeputy note: currently about 18,100 RMB), and the current auction price is US$27,643 (currently about 200,000 RMB), which has not yet reached the reserve price.
This supercomputer was officially put into operation on January 12, 2017, and will be retired on December 31, 2023. It played an important role at the Supercomputing Center of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Wyoming, providing powerful and reliable data for atmospheric and earth system scientific research. Efficient computing power.
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During its lifetime, Cheyenne operated more than 7 billion core hours, served more than 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 National Science Foundation-funded projects. The Alliance of Universities for Atmospheric Research writes on its official information page: “It also plays a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training activities. Nearly 1,000 projects have been awarded to early career graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Most deserving Notably, Cheyenne-supported research has resulted in more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, doctoral theses, master's theses and other works.”
Due to severe supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, the “Cheyenne” was originally planned to serve for five years, but was ultimately extended by two years. The auction page shows that Cheyenne has recently experienced maintenance constraints due to a cooling system rapid circuit breaker failure, causing approximately 1% of the compute nodes to fail, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Concerned about repair costs and downtime, the U.S. government decided to auction off its components.
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This SGI ICE XA system has a peak performance of 5340 teraflops (4788 Linpack teraflops) and can perform more than 3 billion calculations per watt of energy consumption, making it three times more energy efficient than its predecessor, the Yellowstone. The system has 4032 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, 313 TB of memory and 40 PB of storage. The entire system operates with a power consumption of 1.7 MW.
By comparison, the current world's number one supercomputer, Frontier, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops per second, has 8,699,904 CPU cores, and consumes 22.7 megawatts.
The General Services Administration reminds potential buyers that moving these bulky racks and components requires professional movers and the proper equipment. This auction includes 7 pairs of electronic units (14 in total), each with a Cooling Distribution Unit (CDU). Each electronic unit weighs approximately 1,500 pounds. Also included are two air-cooled “Cheyenne” management racks, each weighing 2,500 pounds, which contain servers, switches and power supplies.
So far, 12 potential buyers have placed bids on the mammoth computer, and the auction will end on May 5 at 6:11 pm Central Time. However, the auction website also reminds everyone that fiber optics and CAT5/6 cabling are not included in the auction package.