Cheyenne (supercomputer)
| Company type | Supercomputer |
|---|---|
| Industry | High-performance computing |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Defunct | 2024 |
| Headquarters | Cheyenne, Wyoming , United States |
| Products | High-performance computing system |
| Owner | National Science Foundation, University of Wyoming |
The Cheyenne supercomputer, located at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was operational from 2017 until 2024 and stood among the globe’s most powerful and energy-conscious computing platforms. In the November 2016 TOP500 rankings, it secured the 20th position worldwide, while by November 2023 it was ranked 159th. Delivering a peak performance of 5.34 petaflops, Cheyenne offered more than three times the computational power of its predecessor, Yellowstone, and achieved triple the energy efficiency, reaching over three billion calculations per second for each watt consumed.
The system received funding from the National Science Foundation alongside support from Wyoming’s state government through the University of Wyoming. Cheyenne was instrumental in advancing atmospheric and Earth system sciences by enabling researchers to execute sophisticated models that simulate intricate natural phenomena. These simulations generated critical information aiding resource management, policy formulation, and risk reduction efforts. The supercomputer’s capabilities contributed to enhancing public safety, safeguarding assets, and bolstering the competitiveness of U.S. industries on the international stage.
Researchers across the country utilized Cheyenne to examine phenomena such as weather patterns, climate dynamics, wildfire behavior, seismic events, and airflow around wind farms. The resulting insights improved forecasting accuracy, which benefited key sectors including agriculture, energy production, transportation logistics, and tourism.
The naming of the supercomputer paid tribute to Cheyenne’s local community support for NWSC and commemorated the city’s 150th anniversary. In April 2024, Cheyenne was put up for auction as surplus government property with an opening bid of $2,500; after receiving 27 bids, it was sold on May 3, 2024.
Replacement
The successor to Cheyenne, known as the Derecho supercomputer, was revealed on January 27, 2021. This system is a 19.87 petaflop HPE Cray machine capable of performing 20 quadrillion operations per second—approximately 3.5 times faster than Cheyenne. Although initially planned for deployment in early 2022, Derecho officially commenced operations on July 7, 2023.
Derecho comprises 2,488 uniform CPU compute nodes alongside 82 heterogeneous GPU nodes equipped with a total of 382 NVIDIA A100 GPUs and houses an aggregate memory capacity of 692 terabytes.
System Description
Constructed by Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI), Cheyenne integrated a centralized file system and storage infrastructure supplied by DataDirect Networks (DDN). This high-performance system achieved over five quadrillion calculations per second at its peak capacity of 5.34 petaflops. Its data storage solution was incorporated within NCAR's GLobally Accessible Data Environment (GLADE), initially providing 20 petabytes expandable to 40 petabytes; combined with an additional 16 petabytes allocated to GLADE itself, this amounted to a total of 36 petabytes of rapid-access storage as of early 2017.
Cheyenne was based on an SGI ICE XA architecture featuring 4,032 dual-socket nodes powered by Intel Xeon E5-2697v4 processors running at 2.3 GHz with 18 cores each. The system’s memory ranged between 203 and 315 terabytes across these nodes. Connectivity was established via a Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network configured in a low-latency nine-dimensional enhanced hypercube topology. The operating system deployed was SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 12 SP1.
Integrated within NWSC’s infrastructure, Cheyenne’s design emphasized a shared file system that unified computation, analysis, and visualization workflows into a cohesive environment for scientific research. The GLADE data pool provided a common online disk capacity totaling approximately 36.4 petabytes shared among supercomputers, data analysis clusters, visualization resources both local and remote, as well as an archival system capable of storing up to 320 petabytes of research data. High-speed networking linked Cheyenne to science gateways, data transfer services, remote visualization platforms, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), and international partner institutions.
This tight integration allowed researchers to conduct high-resolution geophysical simulations alongside data analysis and visualization within a single computing ecosystem, significantly enhancing efficiency by reducing data transfer bottlenecks. Annually, Cheyenne supplied over 1.2 billion core-hours dedicated to Earth system science investigations.