Cheyenne was one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. It’s “obsolete” and the US is putting it up for auction

If you have the space and, above all, a lot of money, you can now try to buy what was once one of the most powerful supercomputers. We’re talking about a beast that even today boasts performance 5.34 petaflops and, it should be noted, works with Linux Enterprise Server.

Cheyenne, as our protagonist is called, was ranked 20th in the famous Top500 ranking of outstanding computer systems at the time of installation in 2016. He started working a year later at the NCAR-Wyoming supercomputing center, but had already completed his cycle.

Cheyenne supercomputer to be auctioned in US

For nearly seven years, Cheyenne has been a key resource for researchers in a variety of fields. They used their computing power to run simulations and quantify the probabilities of future events, resulting in more than 4,500 peer-reviewed publications and other scientific articles.

At the hardware level, the system had 4032 nodes, each of which had two 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 “Broadwell” processors running at 2.3 GHz. However, the nodes had differences at the memory level. Some had 64 GB, others 128 GB. The whole thing was connected by Mellanox EDR InfiniBand.

One of Cheyenne’s greatest advantages, far superior to more modern systems, was its energy efficiency. When it was commissioned, it was three times more powerful than its predecessor, Yellowstone, but consumed only 25% more energy. However, it was planned to be replaced after five years of use.

However, due to supply issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCAR’s service life has been extended by an additional two years. Now it will finally be replaced by the new high-performance HPE-Cray EX system with a performance of 19.87 petaflops, but Cheyenne’s 5.34 petaflops may still be useful to someone.

That’s a lot of computing power, but it’s significantly inferior to Frontier, the most advanced supercomputer to date, a beast that has reached the breaking point. Exacque barrier with its 1194 petaflops (Rmax). Frontier is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Returning to the topic of Cheyenne, as of this writing, bidding that started at $2,500 has risen to $350,000, with 26 people interested in the supercomputer. The auction ends in about 4 hours this Friday, May 3rd, so there isn’t much time left to purchase it.

Images | GSA Auctions

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