News For sale: Cheyenne supercomputer with 8,064 Xeon CPUs and 306TB of DDR4 memory — some assembly and maintenance required

[Admin]

The U.S. government is auctioning off the Cheyenne supercomputer that entered operation in back in 2016. It currently requires some repairs and maintenance, weighs about 26,000 pounds, and is in need of a new home. Current bidding sits at less than $30,000 — though the reserve has not yet been met.

For sale: Cheyenne supercomputer with 8,064 Xeon CPUs and 306TB of DDR4 memory — some assembly and maintenance required : Read more

 

[jp7189]

Talk about a poor return on investment.

 

[jp7189]

I know the main article mentions leaky water connections, but "water spray" sounds a lot worse than I was thinking. From thr listing:
"However, the system is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray."

 

[Avro Arrow]

It's not even worth the power it uses at this point. The powererformance ratio is what really kills older supercomputers compared to new ones because the new ones are so much less expensive to operate.

 

[punkncat]

I also found it interesting the disclosure of how heavy this thing is, as well as the need for specialized personnel and equipment required to move it. Optical and cabing not included....and how about the aspect that 1% of this gigantic pool of RAM is bad. They mention ECC RAM and one could do the math as to how many sticks that compromises and wonder if it can even be found at this point?

It seems to me a lot like the current owner has found a way to have someone else pay to move a large bit of equipment that is facing operational obsolescence.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I also found it interesting the disclosure of how heavy this thing is, as well as the need for specialized personnel and equipment required to move it. Optical and cabing not included....and how about the aspect that 1% of this gigantic pool of RAM is bad. They mention ECC RAM and one could do the math as to how many sticks that compromises and wonder if it can even be found at this point?

It seems to me a lot like the current owner has found a way to have someone else pay to move a large bit of equipment that is facing operational obsolescence.

$50,000 bid right now and still "reserve not met." It's pretty clear the US gov't doesn't really want to try to fix the problems with Cheyenne, but it also looks like it's not just trying to offload the movement of the hardware to someone else. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a reserve.

Though I suspect when all is said and done, they might attempt to work out some agreement with the top bidder, whether or not the reserve has been met. 1.7MW of power is a lot, to say the least. Sure, there are supercomputers that can use 60MW out there... but those are also not leaking and failing in various ways, and they're about 150X faster than this older supercomputer.

The real difficulty is that, even if you want to part this sucker out, that will take a long time and it's very niche hardware considering its age. You can often find used servers from 10 years back selling for a song, relatively speaking. Because data centers don't want them, and neither do most businesses or even server enthusiasts. Anyone who has been in a data center can tell you how much fun it is to sit next to even one server with all those whirring fans!

I'm betting the top bidder will end up being some recycling / parting out business, though. I just can't imagine anyone really wanting to try to "fix" a leaky supercomputer that the US government is unwilling to deal with.

 

[PEnns]

Well, maybe somebody could salvage some of the components and use it to build something that will run ...........Crysis smoothly.

 

[brandonjclark]

It's not even worth the power it uses at this point. The powererformance ratio is what really kills older supercomputers compared to new ones because the new ones are so much less expensive to operate.

There should be at least 30k in raw materials in that thing, right?

 

[Co BIY]

A university or government agency in a developing country seems like one of the few likely markets for something like this. Where you could have a pool of skilled but low cost labor for the upkeep and some need for the computing power on the cheap.


The nice thing about the Cray-1 is that after it was no longer useful as a computer it was still functional as furniture.

https://www.cisl.ucar.edu/sites/def...large/public/2021-10/cray1.jpeg?itok=fegEQU0V

 

[Amdlova]

The software costs and additional hardware and engineers to run that will be insane.
Better scrap it

 

[jp7189]

There should be at least 30k in raw materials in that thing, right?

I did some screwing around on ebay last night, and it seems you could get ~$500-700k from CPUs and RAM..theoretically. Actually selling 8000+ CPUs might be kinda hard.

 

[Patterner]

"But Can It Run Crysis?"

 

[hayroe]

Bidding is now at about $100k, and I don’t see a ‘reserve not met’ message.
Really makes me wonder who’s bidding on this potential pile of challenges….

 

[Jerry_W14]

The U.S. government is auctioning off the Cheyenne supercomputer that entered operation in back in 2016. It currently requires some repairs and maintenance, weighs about 26,000 pounds, and is in need of a new home. Current bidding sits at less than $30,000 — though the reserve has not yet been met.

For sale: Cheyenne supercomputer with 8,064 Xeon CPUs and 306TB of DDR4 memory — some assembly and maintenance required : Read more

Rather than parting the system out. It would be better to grind it up and separate the metals. The gold in those cpus, the steel, aluminum, etc. If you melt it all down you can use a centrifuge to separate the metals. Then using a tower distillation system, separate the offgasses, those can be processed further later down the line. Energy intensive, maybe, but compared to what it took to make and run it, not really. Recover as much as possible then sell it back into the market as feed stock. The US has imported enough refined metals in the form of products that we have enough to use as semi refined raw materials once the paint and other coatings are stripped during the heating and melting process. We really don't need to import more from China, our landfills are getting full.

 

[kb7rky]

...but can it run Doom?

 

[kal326]

I did some screwing around on ebay last night, and it seems you could get ~$500-700k from CPUs and RAM..theoretically. Actually selling 8000+ CPUs might be kinda hard.

The money is in the ram honestly. Even DDR4 2400 has some decent value in the unused market. Really depends on the per stick density as 32GB still regularly sells for near $1/GB if not a bit under.

The CPUs are around $40 a piece. The v4 series has come down a lot recently and I would imagine dumping 8k more chips into the market would only further depress that $40 price. The only thing holding up in price is high core count 2699 v4 chips and even those are still coming down as they are being pushed out by gen 1 and 2 Xeon Scale.

Interesting part out, but given the water issues it would be a lot of testing and time to see what was all salvageable.

 

[dtemple]

It would still lag on Cities Skylines II.

 

[stonecarver]

Beside the value or parting it or scraping it or some huge deep pocket bidder for it all.

It would be cool to preserve it and donate it to the Smithsonian museum.

Even if it was never fired up again in our life time it would leave a foot print of where we were looking back in 100 years.

 

[Avro Arrow]

There should be at least 30k in raw materials in that thing, right?

Maybe... the problem is that there's a lot of labour involved in separating said raw materials so the question is how much it will cost to strip all of the wires to get the copper out of them, to soak the PCBs in acid to get the gold out of them, etc. The silicon itself has no material value because it's just sand.

Actually, if a country like Algeria wanted to buy it, all they would need is to set up a solar farm in the southern part of their country and they'd have all the power that the thing needs for free.

 

[jobmontro]

quick math says the memory alone is worth $400k+ usd in used market.

 

[NeonHD]

Buyer is responsible for relocation of 26,000 pounds of equipment

I really doubt it's a single person that is bidding for this. That 'buyer' is most likely a company, probably one that sells components or actually using it in their infrastructure.