Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction ends with $480,085 bid — buyer walked away with 8,064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs, 313TB DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, and some water leaks
One lucky buyer had their day yesterday as the U.S. government's online auction for selling its Cheyenne supercomputer ended at $480,085. The auction, first covered by Tom's Hardware on Wednesday, has closed after 27 bidders contended for a piece of supercomputing history.
The Cheyenne supercomputer's 6-figure sale price comes with 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz, which hover around $50 (£40) a piece on eBay. Paired with this armada of processors is 313 TB of RAM split between 4,890 64GB ECC-compliant modules, which command around $65 (£50) per stick online. For a deeper dive into Cheyenne's components and prime performance, check out our initial sale coverage. Unfortunately for buyers, none of the Cheyenne supercomputer's 32 petabytes of high-speed storage are being sold with the lot. Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit.
This estimate assumes all of the CPUs and RAM sticks work, which is invalid. The auction site disclaims that "approximately 1% of nodes experienced failure [over the last six months], primarily attributed to DIMMs with ECC errors, which will remain unrepaired." This high failure rate is the reason for the sale, with upkeep made challenging by the fact that Cheyenne "is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray." These two compounding issues have cost the Cheyenne team undue downtime and repair costs, leading them to look for a replacement.
