On Tuesday, the U.S. General Services Administration launched an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34 petaflop supercomputer was ranked 20th most powerful in the world at the time of its installation in 2016. Bidding started at $2,500, but the price is currently $270,085.
The supercomputer, officially operational at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center between January 12, 2017 and December 31, 2023, was a powerful (and once considered energy efficient) system that significantly advanced research in atmospheric and Earth system sciences .
“Over its lifetime, Cheyenne delivered over 7 billion core hours, served over 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 NSF awards,” writes the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on its official Cheyenne information page. “It played a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training events. Almost 1,000 projects were recognized for early-career doctoral and postdoctoral students. Perhaps most tellingly, the research Cheyenne conducted produced over 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, dissertations, and theses and other works.
UCAR says Cheynne was originally scheduled to be replaced after five years, but the Covid-19 pandemic significantly disrupted supply chains and the company needed two additional years of service. The auction site states that Cheyenne recently experienced service limitations due to faulty quick disconnects in its cooling system. As a result, about 1 percent of compute nodes failed, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Given the costs and downtime associated with repairs, it was decided to auction the components.
With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops), this SGI ICE system featured 4,032 dual-socket nodes, each with two 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors running at 2.3 GHz, for a total of 145,152 CPU cores. It also included 313 TB of memory and 40 petabytes of storage. The entire system consumed around 1.7 megawatts of electricity during operation.
For comparison, the world’s current top-rated supercomputer – Frontier at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee – has a theoretical peak performance of 1,679.82 petaflops, includes 8,699,904 CPU cores and consumes 22.7 megawatts of power.
The GSA cautions that potential Cheyenne buyers should be aware that professional movers with appropriate equipment are required to transport the heavy racks and components. The auction includes seven E-Cell pairs (14 in total), each with a cooling distribution unit (CDU). Each E-cell weighs approximately 1,500 pounds. Additionally, the auction includes two Cheyenne air-cooled management racks, each weighing 2,500 pounds, containing servers, switches and power supplies.
As of this writing, 23 potential buyers have bid on this computer monster. If you’re interested in bidding, the auction ends May 3 at 6:11 p.m. Central Time. But don’t get too excited by photos of the extensive cabling: As the auction site notes, “Fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling are excluded from the resale package.”
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.