WebMail 
Iconic “5.34 PFLOPs” Cheyenne Supercomputer Gets Listed On Government Auction, Currently Bidding At $10,000
“Retired” Cheyenne Super computer is finally up for auction by GSACurrently going for around $10,000, which is nothing when you consider what Cheyenne hosts.
An out-of-service Cheyenne supercomputer is going up at an auction, for an unbelievable price
For a quick background, the Cheyenne supercomputer came into existence in 2017 and is used by the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) for HPC applications, particularly for scientific research related to climate modeling and weather forecasting. Cheyenne was indeed a landmark of its time and achieved three times the power of the previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. However, after seven years of service, the supercomputer was decommissioned and is apparently now up for auction at rather ridiculous prices.
Bidding on the Cheyenne supercomputer is currently $10,500, and will last for three days. Therefore, the price is subject to change. Even so, the GSA auction means the supercomputer will likely end up in the hands of a professional organization, meaning the average person won't have access to the technology if you're hoping for it.
Diving into the specifications, the Cheyenne supercomputer features Intel's Xeon processors, which come from the Broadwell lineup, along with 313 TB of computational memory and relatively advanced technologies. Here's the full spec sheet listed by NCAR:
Hardware
| 145,152 processor core | 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 |
| Melancholy EDR Infinity Band High speed interconnect |
Partial 9D Enhanced Hypercube Single-Plane Interconnect Topology Bandwidth: 25 GBps bi-directional per link Latency: MPI Ping-Pong <1 µs; Hardware link 130 ns |
| 3x Yellowstone computational capacity | Comparison based on relative performance of runs on each system. |
| > 3.5 times Yellowstone peak efficiency | 5.34 peak petaflops (vs. 1.504) |
This shows that the price tag currently coming for the Cheyenne is a bargain, considering the features it comes with; However, since the bid is going to last for more than 3 days from now, it may get even heavier. It's interesting to see the Cheyenne type retail at an auction, and despite being a seven-year-old machine, it served the purpose for which it was built.
