Cheyenne supercomputer sells at auction for just $480K The Cheyenne Supercomputer, a 5.34 peak PFLOPS behemoth that was once one of the fastest systems in the world, has just been sold at auction for $480,085. Cheyenne had 27 bidders over a seven-day auction that concluded Friday. Cheyenne's new owner will be carting away the SGI-built system with 145,152 CPU cores in 8,064 Intel …
"Moving this system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company,"
This outfit was established in 1931...
"Moving this system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company,"
I seriously doubt it. All you need is the right truck/trailer and appropriate tie-downs, a couple clueful mates[0], and some heavy lift equipment. That's how I got all my big iron here. It's also how I got my brewing gear, my bottling lines, the bulk fermentation and aging tanks, and most of my planting and harvesting equipment. Etc. No lives lost, and everybody still has all their fingers and toes.
[0] Note the use of the word clueful. It's important.
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So it weighs 43 tonnes and consumes three quarters of a megawatt when idling...
...I think you'll need a lot more than a bigger basement!
I hope the purchaser is an enthusiast wanting to get it running again, not somebody who'll strip the parts and dump them on eBay...
...and, damn, imagine the bragging rights of somebody who casually says "my computer runs Linux" and that is their computer.
Originally when these machines were designed and built, it was a technical view everywhere. This quote was not a complaint like it would be if you say it today - he was just describing the early computing technology world to keep all the users happy (and working very hard).
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years." - John Von Neumann, circa 1949
E5-2697v4 £90
32GB DDR4 ECC £45
Assuming 90% good parts the CPUs would be worth £650k retail and the memory would be worth another £300k
Even after allowing for the much lower wholesale prices, just the CPUs and memory should pay for the purchase price and transport.
Scrap metal (inc gold recovery) should make a decent profit even if none of the other parts are used.
If any of the nodes are sold as working systems then the profit could be very nice.
Interesting note here, the specified CPU is still current.
LGA2011v3 which isn't that hard to find a board for.
If hypothetically someone wanted to build a test system for the broken ECC, that would be a good method.
I suspect that it might be a matter of running a selective memory test, the sort of problems that affect ECC are
common to regular memory such as bad connections and oddly enough failure of the buffer IC.
Have some faulty DDR3 16GB RDIMMs here and the problem seems to be a memory training error.
This is a blade based system (I managed several of the previous generation ICE systems). The motherboards are Supermicro.
If 1% of the blades have ECC errors what you do is take them out of service and cannablise them for spares.
OK, your number of available blades/cores slowly decreases but you should be prepared for that.
The issue with the quick connects is more disturbing. The hoses resemble thick washing machine hoses, with sping ball valves on the end.
I guess the issue is with these ball valves.
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