Starting price was $2500
Modern supercomputers cost their customers hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. But now there is a unique opportunity to buy a full-fledged supercomputer with more than 8,000 processors for just a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The US General Services Administration has put up for auction its Cheyenne supercomputer, which was deployed at the NCAR-Wyoming Center (NWSC) back in 2016. The starting price was $2,500, but bids have now risen to around $30,000. The auction will last three more days, so the price may rise significantly, but it is unlikely to reach the millions of dollars that this system supposedly cost when it appeared.
It is important to say that at the time of its release, Cheyenne ranked 20th on the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. It is powered by 8064 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors and has 313 TB of RAM and 40 PB of storage. The system consumes 1.7 MW of power and offers a performance of 5.34 PFLOPS.
According to management, during its existence Cheyenne has worked more than 7 billion core hours and served more than 4,400 users. He has played a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and learning activities. Perhaps most tellingly, Cheyenne's research has spawned more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, dissertations, and more.
It is worth saying that due to certain problems, approximately 1% of the compute nodes failed, mainly due to ECC errors in DIMMs. The agency also notes that moving heavy shelving and components will require professional movers with the appropriate equipment.