The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is currently auctioning off a decommissioned 8064 supercomputer with 5.34 Petaflops Intel Xeon chips. Although the initial price was only $2500, the bid has already exceeded $280 thousand.
From January 2017 to December 2023, the Cheyenne supercomputer operated at the NCAR-Wyoming computer center and was the 20th most powerful computer in the world at the time of its commissioning. According to WikipediaIt was still considered the 160th largest in terms of capacity as of November last year.
The computer has 8064 Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors with 18 cores each, running at up to 3.6 GHz and a TDP of 145 watts. A total of 145,152 computing cores are combined with 313,344 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM. However, the GSA warns that in 7 years of operation «approximately 1% of the nodes have experienced a failure… mainly related to DIMMs with ECC errors that will remain uncorrected».
There are a few other small factors to consider as well. First, it doesn’t come with fiber optic and CAT5/6 cables, which can lead to additional costs. Also, the auction organizers warn about the safety of transportation:
«A professional transportation company is required to move this system. Due to the considerable weight of the racks, experienced movers equipped with proper professional safety equipment are required to ensure safe handling. The buyer is responsible for transferring the racks from the site to the trucks using their equipment».
The water cooling system has also been removed from the computer — it appears to have had some issues «due to faulty quick disconnects causing water splashing». However, it came with some used PGW coolant in the box. So, to get the supercomputer up and running, it will need to be repaired, and additional space for the CO due to its large volume.
Source: PC Gamer