One lucky buyer had their day yesterday as the U.S. government's online auction for its Cheyenne supercomputer ended at $480,085. The auction, first covered by Tom's Hardware on Wednesday, has closed after 27 bidders contended for a piece of supercomputing history.
The Cheyenne supercomputer's six-figure sale price comes with 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz, which hover around $50 (£40) a piece on eBay. Paired with this armada of processors is 313 TB of RAM split between 4,890 64GB ECC-compliant modules, which command around $65 (£50) per stick online. For a deeper dive into Cheyenne's components and prime performance, check out our initial sale coverage. Unfortunately for buyers, none of the Cheyenne supercomputer's 32 petabytes of high-speed storage are being sold with the lot. Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit.
