If you’ve ever wanted to own your very own supercomputer, then rejoice: the US General Services Administration is auctioning off Cheyenne, a supercomputer belonging to the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Cheyenne is located at the NCAR’s Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It’s been in operation since 2016, and the havoc that COVID wrought on global supply chains means that it’s being retired two years later than anticipated. The extra work looks to have taken its toll: according to the auction listing, which was first spotted by Ars Technica, the machine’s water cooling system has had issues with “faulty disconnects causing water spray.” The idea of water spraying all over a multi-million dollar supercomputer is exactly as bad as it sounds, and the NCAR has decided that “the expense and downtime associated with rectifying this issue” has meant that “it’s deemed more detrimental than the anticipated failure rate of compute nodes.” It’s simply not worth it keeping it operational, so to the auction house it goes.
Supercomputers operate in a completely different realm to the consumer computers we use in everyday life. The most commonly used metric for making comparisons between supercomputers is the number of floating-point operations they can carry out per second, because these calculations are vital to scientific models, complex simulations, and various other high-end applications. “Floating-point operations” is abbreviated as FLOPS, and today’s supercomputers operate in the range of petaFLOPS. At its peak performance, Cheyenne was good for 5.34 petaFLOPS, which would place it just outside the top 100 most powerful machines in the world today. It’s unlikely to be able to reach that number these days, as the cooling issues mean that “1% of nodes [have] experienced failure … which will remain unrepaired.”
This might sound less than impressive, but even a…
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