The US General Services Administration-owned Cheyenne supercomputer has been sold for $480,000.
The system, which was deployed at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NSWC), was put up for auction earlier this month.
The 5.34 petaflops (Linkpack) system was sold to an unnamed buyer after 27 bidders contended for the supercomputer.
The price of Cheyenne at construction is unknown, but its predecessor, Yellowstone, was quoted at $25-35 million before construction, according to a report from Tom’s Hardware.
The water-cooled supercomputer features SGI ICE XA modules, 28 racks, and 8,064 Intel E5-2697v4 CPUs (for a total of 145,152 cores). It has DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank, 64 GB per node, with 3 High Memory E-Cells having 128GB per node, totaling 313,344GB.
Two air-cooled management racks consist of 26 1U Servers (20 with 128 GB RAM, 6 with 256 GB RAM), 10 Extreme Switches, and 2 Extreme Switch power units. Each rack weighs 2500 lbs.
The sale does not include the supercomputer’s 32 petabytes of high-speed storage, nor does it include the shipping of the system.
The Cheyenne system was mainly used for weather and climate studies across the state of Wyoming and the rest of the US when required.
Cheyenne outlived its planned life - with the NWSC's original announcement saying that it would run until 2021 - but has proved too old to continue to maintain.
"The system is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray," the auction listing noted.
Earlier last month, France’s CRIANN decommissioned the Myria supercomputer, opting to recycle and repurpose the parts.
