Cheyenne, an American supercomputer once ranked 20th in the world and featuring 8,000 Intel Xeon CPUs and 300TB of RAM (plus some maintenance issues, including water leaks), was recently auctioned by the US General Services Administration. .US (GSA).
After a fight between 27 bidders, Cheyenne settled for a respectable $480,085, plus the costs of dismantling it and moving it to its new home.
If you fancy owning a supercomputer, but your pockets aren't that deep, or you prefer one that doesn't require repairs, then Supermicro has you covered.
More for your money
How he saw it serve the home, Supermicro is selling complete Intel Gaudi 2 servers for $90,000. Pricing for AI servers isn't usually advertised, so it's interesting to see this promotion titled (somewhat awkwardly): “Supermicro and Intel Team Up for Special Pricing on a Gaudi 2 GPU Server.”
Do you want to know what you will get for your money? This “special configuration” (SYS-820GH-TNR2-01) includes a Supermicro Gaudi 2 system, supporting eight Habana Gaudi-2 OAM Mezz cards (8U), two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 processors, 16x 64 GB 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, license of System Management Software Suite node and eight Intel Gaudi 2 OCP OAM Spec v1.3 with heat sink.
If that doesn't exactly meet your needs, or you want to take advantage of a discount, you can configure your own Supermicro Gaudi 2 Server, choosing the components you need. However, you will need to speak to Supermicro directly for pricing.
Intel released Gaudi 3 in April 2024, so you won't get the latest hardware. serve the home broke down some of the costs of the announced server, noting: “What's interesting about this is that it still uses an Ice Lake Xeon platform, so it's on PCIe Gen4 and lower-cost DDR4 memory. The list price of the Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 processors is $7,214 each. Those 64 GB DIMMs usually cost between $3,000 and $3,200 for 16 of them in new systems. There's probably another $1500-2000 worth of 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 integrated 100GbE network directly from the AI accelerators.”
