The retired Cheyenne supercomputer sold at online auction for a winning bid of $480,085 in May 2024. The lot was a 28-rack, water-cooled research system—not a ready-to-use computer—and did not include Cheyenne’s 32-petabyte high-speed storage array. The buyer was not publicly identified in the reporting.
What was included in the $480,085 auction?
The buyer acquired a retired SGI system installed at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It contained 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors, totaling 145,152 CPU cores, and more than 313 terabytes of DDR4-2400 error-correcting-code (ECC) memory. Its stated theoretical peak capability was 5.34 petaflops. Tom’s Hardware’s auction report and The Register’s report provide the sale and hardware details; NCAR/UCAR gives the peak figure in its Cheyenne retrospective.
The 32-petabyte high-speed storage array was excluded from the auction lot, according to Tom’s Hardware. That distinction matters: the sale price was for the listed retired system, not for every storage resource associated with Cheyenne.
How much did Cheyenne sell for, and who bought it?
The winning bid was $480,085. The Register reported 27 bidders. Neither its report nor Tom’s Hardware’s account publicly named the buyer. The published figure is the winning bid; the sources do not establish the buyer’s all-in cost after removal, transport, or any work needed to recommission the equipment.
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Why was a government supercomputer auctioned?
Cheyenne had completed its high-performance-computing mission as the newer Derecho system took over. NSF NCAR’s FY2024 annual report says staff decommissioned Cheyenne and associated systems and auctioned it in May 2024. The report describes decommissioning as a complex task.
What was Cheyenne used for?
Cheyenne began operating in January 2017 at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. NCAR and UCAR described it as a national research resource for climate change, severe weather, geomagnetic storms, seismic activity, air quality, wildfires, and related Earth-system science. It offered roughly three times the scientific-computing capacity of its predecessor, Yellowstone, according to NCAR/UCAR.
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Among the research conducted on Cheyenne was work examining the atmospheric effects of Australia’s massive 2019–20 bushfires and their relationship to a rare multi-year La Niña event. The system’s value therefore lay not simply in its raw processor count, but in making large-scale scientific simulations possible for researchers.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why would anyone buy an old supercomputer?
A buyer might value a system like Cheyenne for its components or for specialized computing workloads, but acquiring it is not equivalent to buying an ordinary workstation. Reporting described the system as water-cooled and requiring dismantling and removal; the racks, power and cooling infrastructure, facilities, and skilled support all affect whether it can be used economically. The $480,085 bid alone does not show the full cost of ownership.
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The published auction information does not identify the buyer or establish what they planned to do with the system. Nor does the headline bid alone reveal the total cost of transporting, installing, powering, cooling, and maintaining it. It is best understood as a purchase of retired data-center-scale infrastructure, with value dependent on the buyer’s intended use and ability to handle the logistics.
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