Someone purchased the eight year old Cheyenne supercomputer for $480k. Failing hardware. Leaking water system. What would it be good for? Selling for parts would flood the market. Testing the parts would take forever. They also have to pay for transport from it's current location. Originally built by SGI.
https://gsaauctions.gov/auctions/preview/282996
https://www.popsci.com/technology/for-sale-government-supercomputer-heavily-used/
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/multi-million-dollar-cheyenne-supercomputer-auction-ends-with-480085-bid
Cheyenne Supercomputer - Water Cooling System
Components of the Cheyenne Supercomputer
Installed Configuration: SGI ICE™ XA.
E-Cells: 14 units weighing 1500 lbs. each.
E-Racks: 28 units, all water-cooled
Nodes: 4,032 dual socket units configured as quad-node blades
Processors: 8,064 units of E5-2697v4 (18-core, 2.3 GHz base frequency, Turbo up to 3.6GHz, 145W TDP)
Total Cores: 145,152
Memory: DDR4-2400 ECC single-rank, 64 GB per node, with 3 High Memory E-Cells having 128GB per node, totaling 313,344 GB
Topology: EDR Enhanced Hypercube
IB Switches: 224 units
Moving this system necessitates the engagement of a professional moving company. Please note the four (4) attached documents detailing the facility requirements and specifications will be provided. Due to their considerable weight, the racks require experienced movers equipped with proper Professional Protection Equipment (PPE) to ensure safe handling. The purchaser assumes responsibility for transferring the racks from the facility onto trucks using their equipment.
Please note that fiber optic and CAT5/6 cabling are excluded from the resale package.
The internal DAC cables within each cell, although removed, will be meticulously labeled, and packaged in boxes, facilitating potential future reinstallation.
Any ideas (serious or otherwise) of suitable uses for this hardware?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2024, @06:47AM (1 child)
I’d use it to compile chromium for my Gentoo, hopefully before the next chromium version is released.
It currently takes me 6-7 hours on an i7-10870H with 64 GB of ram.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday May 11 2024, @09:50AM
6-7 hours is pretty good!
Chromium takes about 2.5-3hours on nixos's hydra build farm: https://hydra.nixos.org/build/259078571#tabs-buildsteps [nixos.org] https://hydra.nixos.org/build/257957672#tabs-buildsteps [nixos.org]
Firefox takes an hour: https://hydra.nixos.org/build/259120036 [nixos.org]
p.e. I had to go through a few of recent results in https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/chromium.x86_64-linux [nixos.org] where there's build-steps reported for the unwrapped package since there's a bug in hydra's search that made looking for chromium-unwrapped directly return a 500: https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/901 [github.com]
compiling...