The "retired" Cheyenne Supercomputer is finally up for auction by the GSA, currently going for around $10,000, which is nothing when you consider what Cheyenne hosts.
Out-Of-Service Cheyenne Supercomputer Surfaces Up At An Auction, Going For Unbelievable Price
For a quick background, the Cheyenne supercomputer came into existence back in 2017 and was utilized by the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) for HPC applications, particularly for scientific research involving climate modeling and weather forecasting. The Cheyenne was indeed a milestone of its time and brought in three times the power of what the previous supercomputer, Yellowstone, came with. However, after seven years of service, the supercomputer was decommissioned and is apparently up for auction right now at rather absurd pricing.
The bid on the Cheyenne supercomputer is currently $10,500, and it will last for three days; hence, the price is subject to change. Despite that, the GSA auction means that the supercomputer will likely go into the hands of a professional organization, meaning that an ordinary individual won't have access to this technology if you are hoping for it.
Diving into the specifications, the Cheyenne supercomputer features Intel's Xeon processors, coming from the Broadwell lineup, along with 313 TB of computational memory and relatively high-end technologies. Here is the complete spec sheet, as listed by the NCAR:
Hardware
| 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 times Yellowstone computational capacity | Comparison based on the relative performance of CISL High Performance Computing Benchmarks run on each system. |
| > 3.5 times Yellowstone peak performance | 5.34 peak petaflops (vs. 1.504) |
It's evident by this that the price tag the Cheyenne is coming for at the moment is a bargain, considering the specifications it comes with; however, since the bid is to last for more than 3 days from now, it might increase to more hefty ones. It's interesting to see the Cheyenne sort of retailing at an auction, and despite it being a seven-year-old machine, it did serve the purpose it was built for.
