Gigantic supercomputers are nothing to us mere mortals. They won’t fit in our house, and classic Doom won’t be faster on them either. So what about them?
Either way, one lucky buyer had his day yesterday when he snapped up a Cheyenne supercomputer for $480,085 at a US government online auction. The auction was hosted by the well-known website Tom’s Hardware, and 27 bidders were bidding on the supercomputer.
The Cheyenne supercomputer has 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz (about $50 each on eBay). Paired with this army of processors is 313TB of memory split between 4,890 64GB ECC modules ($65 each). Unfortunately, none of the 32PB of high-speed storage is sold with the supercomputer. If a buyer wanted to dump the memory and processors somewhere in the bazaar, he could fetch about $700,000, that is, assuming that many fools could be found.
But this sales price estimate assumes all CPUs and memory are working, bad luck. The auction site mentioned that approximately 1% of nodes experienced an error in the last six months, primarily due to memory issues. It is the high failure rate and difficult maintenance that is the reason for the sale. However, the failure rate is justified, as the Cheyenne has had a strict work load during its seven years of operation. Used by scientists in the state of Wyoming, the 5.34 petaFLOPS system was mainly used for weather and climate studies. The machine was estimated to cost about 25 million dollars, so the final auction price is really a bargain.
The buyer will be especially happy to be able to move the 30 Cheyenne server racks themselves, since the government is not providing the shipping or providing the Ethernet or fiber optic cables needed to get the machine up and running. But then again, he’ll have a supercomputer and that’s cool in itself.
Tags: powerhungry buyer bought government supercomputer auction ridiculous price
