Cheyenne supercomputer sold for 2% of original price

At online auctions you can buy everything from gadgets to entire buildings and structures. In addition, there is also the opportunity to purchase a supercomputer, and at a cheap price. Recently it became known that the Cheyenne was sold for only $480,085. Together with the winner, 27 other participants competed for this lot. online bidding. For such a system, half a million dollars is mere pennies. What happened?

An anonymous private buyer received the entire system for next to nothing, including 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors, 313 TB of RAM and some problems in the cooling system. The latter were the reason for the sale of Cheyenne. The lot description also states that not all processors and RAM modules are in working condition. The auction site wrote that “about 1% of nodes experienced operational failures in the last 6 months, mainly due to ECC errors in memory modules that were not repaired.” The seller also noted that the Cheyenne “currently has limited service due to faulty cooling system connections.”

History of Cheyenne

Cheyenne was developed based on the HPE SGI 8600 supercomputing architecture and is equipped with Intel Xeon processors. It was heavily used for seven years, which led to its natural wear and tear. During this period, scientists from all over the state of Wyoming, as well as specialists from different parts of the United States, used the services of the computing system.

Cheyenne, with a performance of 5.34 petaflops, was primarily used for weather and climate research. For example, thanks to the supercomputer, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has improved our understanding of climate change and other aspects related to the dynamics of the planet's weather cycles. At launch, the system was the 20th most powerful in the world, but today it is considered too slow and inefficient compared to newer supercomputer models.

The system supported a wide range of scientific research, including the study of climate change, atmospheric dynamics, weather modeling, hydrometeorology projects and other tasks. In addition, it was also highly energy efficient. The supercomputer used advanced cooling and power management technologies, which allowed it to achieve high performance levels with relatively low power consumption.

It is difficult to say how unprofitable the sale of Cheyenne was for the government. There is no absolutely accurate data on how much the computer cost at the time of its creation. But it is clear that these are millions, tens of millions of US dollars. The fact is that the previous system, Yellowstone, before its creation was estimated at $25 million to $35 million. A certain part of the costs was allocated to the construction of the building and the infrastructure to service it. It should be noted that Cheyenne has higher performance and is intended to expand the capabilities of research that was carried out using Yellowstone.

HP's next supercomputer, Derecho, which will replace the Cheyenne, costs about $35-40 million. Experts believe that the cost of the lot sold at auction was approximately the same amount. But according to the most conservative estimates, the real price of the Cheyenne is no less than $25 million. Consequently, at the auction the supercomputer was sold for only 2% of its original cost, which is definitely a good deal for the buyer.

What does the future hold for Cheyenne?

According to the terms of the auction, the buyer will have to transport 30 racks himself. The government does not provide transportation for this, nor does it provide the network or optical cables required to run the computer system. The anonymous winning bidder will have to consider other additional costs. The power at maximum load of the supercomputer reached 1.727 megawatts. This means that if the equipment is used intensively, energy costs can be more than $4,000 per day.

If everything is so expensive, then why does the buyer need it? What benefit can there be from partially faulty and outdated equipment, which requires large associated costs and a considerable area for its placement? Perhaps the new owner does not take into account costs and plans to deploy some kind of computer center.

It may also be that the system was purchased for further sale for “spare parts”. If Xeon chips appear en masse on the secondary market, then we can immediately draw conclusions.

Each of the processors, equipped with 18 cores (36 threads) and clocked at 2.3 GHz, costs about $50 on one of the worldwide e-commerce websites. The RAM is divided into 4,890 64 GB modules with ECC support, each of which costs about $65. Despite the fact that the Cheyenne supercomputer has impressive characteristics and performance, drives were not sold with the system. Experts believe that, given a goal, an experienced seller could resell the processors and RAM for approximately $700,000 and make an impressive profit. Other spare parts can also be sold on the secondary market. Perhaps this is where the calculation of the new owner of the Cheyenne lies.

Super PC rating

In the top three of the rating (relevance – end of last year) are systems from the USA. Specifically, Frontier, which has a peak performance of 1.7 exaflops and is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It is worth noting that the top500 ranking does not include Chinese exascale-class supercomputers, although there are such systems.

In the first hundred there are four supercomputers from Russia, including Chervonenkis, Galushkin and Lyapunov, owned by Yandex. Also here you can see Christofari Neo, working for the cloud subsidiary of SberBank.

Unfortunately, we will never see Cheyenne in the rating again. What can you do, everything flows and changes. Once powerful systems and technologies are becoming obsolete, but new ones are appearing.