Want to Buy a Decommissioned Supercomputer? Here’s Your Chance

On Tuesday, the US General Services Administration began an auction for the decommissioned Cheyenne supercomputer, located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The 5.34-petaflop supercomputer ranked as the 20th most powerful in the world at the time of its installation in 2016. Bidding started at $2,500, but its price is currently $270,085.

The supercomputer, which officially operated between January 12, 2017, and December 31, 2023, at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, was a powerful (and once considered energy-efficient) system that significantly advanced atmospheric and Earth system sciences research.

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«In its lifetime, Cheyenne delivered over 7 billion core-hours, served over 4,400 users, and supported nearly 1,300 NSF awards,» writes the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on its official Cheyenne information page. «It played a key role in education, supporting more than 80 university courses and training events. Nearly 1,000 projects were awarded for early-career graduate students and postdocs. Perhaps most tellingly, Cheyenne-powered research generated over 4,500 peer-review publications, dissertations and theses, and other works.»

UCAR says that Cheynne was originally slated to be replaced after five years, but the Covid-19 pandemic severely disrupted supply chains, and it clocked in two extra years in its tour of duty. The auction page says that Cheyenne recently experienced maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects in its cooling system. As a result, approximately 1 percent of the compute nodes have failed, primarily due to ECC errors in the DIMMs. Given the expense and downtime associated with repairs, the decision was made to auction off the components.

With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops (4,788 Linpack teraflops), this SGI ICE XA system was capable of performing more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, making it three times more energy-efficient than its predecessor, Yellowstone. The system