The US has a long history of supercomputing. A system that was among the most powerful computers in recent years has now become “unusable”. Cheyenne, once the 20th most powerful supercomputer in the world, has been put up for auction.
Cheyenne supercomputer auctioned
A project developed by the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center has been put up for auction. The Cheyenne system, used by the US General Services Administration, was one of the 20 most powerful systems in 2016.
While it has previously been used for weather and disaster modeling, its advanced age and documented failures pose a risk. Cheyenne, which has a 5.34 petaflop throughput, currently has a bid of $50,000. However, it should be kept in mind that the auction is ongoing and the price may increase.
The water-cooled supercomputer has more than 8,000 Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors. It has 145,152 cores. It is also powered by a total of 313,344 GB of memory.
According to an advertisement by the Wyoming Supercomputing Center, more than 1 percent of the system’s compute nodes have failed in the last 6 months. However, it was stated that these processes can be repaired with the support of the technical team. In addition, coolant needs to be drained and switch cables need to be replaced.
It is obvious that extensive maintenance and repairs will be needed to restart operations. The DIMM memory chips, which are probably broken, will need to be replaced. NCAR also stated that transportation costs are at the buyer’s expense.
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