Cheyenne, a US supercomputer once ranked 20th in the world and with 8,000 Intel Xeon CPUs and 300TB of RAM (plus a few maintenance issues, including water leaks), was recently auctioned off by US General Services Administration (GSA).
After a tussle between 27 bidders, Cheyenne went for a respectable $480,085, plus the costs of dismantling and moving it to its new home.
If you fancy owning a supercomputer, but your pockets aren’t quite so deep, or you’d prefer one that isn’t a fixer-upper, then Supermicro has you covered.
Bang for your buck
As spotted by ServeTheHome, Supermicro is selling complete Intel Gaudi 2 servers for $90,000. The price for AI servers isn’t usually advertised, so it’s interesting to see this promotion which is headed (somewhat clumsily): “Supermicro and Intel Team Up for Special Pricing on a Gaudi 2 GPU Server.”
Want to know what you’ll get for your money? This "special configuration" (SYS-820GH-TNR2-01) includes one Supermicro Gaudi 2 system, supporting eight Habana Gaudi-2 OAM Mezz cards (8U), two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 Processors, 16x 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC RDIMM, two 960GB NVMe PCIe 4.0 (M.2), two 7.6TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 (U.2), one NIC, CX-6 VPI (IB/EN), 100G, Dual Port QSFP56, System Management Software Suite Node License, and eight Intel Gaudi 2 OCP OAM Spec v1.3 with heatsink.
If that doesn’t meet your exact needs, or you want to avail yourself of a discount, you can configure your own Supermicro Gaudi 2 Server, choosing the components that you require. You’ll need to speak to Supermicro directly for pricing, however.
Intel launched Gaudi 3 in April 2024, so you won't be getting the latest hardware. ServeTheHome broke down some of the costs of the advertised server, noting, “The interesting part about this is that it is still using an Ice Lake Xeon platform, so it is on PCIe Gen4 and lower-cost DDR4 memory. The list price for the Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 processors is $7214 each. Those 64GB DIMMs usually price out in new systems at around $3000-$3200 for 16 of them. There is probably another $1500-2000 in SSD content and a bit more for the NVIDIA ConenctX-6 VPI NIC. We only have one of those NICs because Gaudi 2 uses its onboard 100GbE networking directly from the AI accelerators.”
