On May 1st, the performance of supercomputers advances rapidly, but what happens to the outdated ones? Auctions provide a solution. Recently, the United States has started auctioning a supercomputer named "Cheyenne" at a starting price of only $2,500, approximately 18,000 Chinese Yuan.
This supercomputer is located at the National Center for Atmospheric Research Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA. It was installed in 2016, put into operation on January 12, 2017, and will be retired on December 31, 2023. Over the span of seven years, it has made outstanding contributions to atmospheric and Earth system science research.
During its service, it ran for over 7 billion core hours, serving more than 4,400 users, supporting nearly 1,300 projects funded by the National Science Foundation, over 80 university courses and training activities, and generating over 4,500 peer-reviewed publications, master's/doctoral theses, and more.
It consists of 4,032 nodes, each equipped with two Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 2.3GHz 18-core processors, totaling 145,152 cores, along with 313TB of memory, 40PB of disk space, and consuming 1.7 megawatts of power.
Its peak performance is 5.34PFlops (5.34 quadrillion floating-point operations per second), ranking 20th globally when it first came online. Today, the world's top system, Frontier, boasts a peak performance of 1.68EFlops (1.68 quintillion floating-point operations per second), with 8,699,904 cores and a power consumption of 22.7 megawatts.
Originally, the "Xia Yan" supercomputer was only planned to be used for five years, but due to disruptions in the supply chain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was forced to operate for an additional two years.
In the end, the cooling system developed issues, leading to approximately 1% of nodes experiencing memory ECC errors. With high downtime and maintenance costs, it had to be decommissioned and put up for auction.
Currently, over ten individuals have shown interest in the supercomputer, with bidding reaching a maximum of $27,643, equivalent to around 200,000 RMB.
