Comment on Here’s your chance to own a decommissioned US government supercomputer
Almrond@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hey, I have worked on this exact machine before, neat to see they are finally decommissioning it. It would be a terrible purchase to actually use these days though, for the cost of moving and deploying it you could rock a few Hopper or Grace clusters that would outperform the cluster for less than half of the operating overhead.
I fully expect it to get parted out, the actual components would be far more useful on their own as cheap homelab systems, and would be a much better ROI versus using it as is.
sum_yung_gai@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What were you using it for?
Almrond@lemmy.world 8 months ago
We were running meteorological models mostly, but I did have a colleague that was trying to use it to predict wildlife migratory patterns using topographical mapping. It was batched out on a few projects at any given time while I was there, it was essentially timeshares between a few different research departments.
0x0@programming.dev 8 months ago
Do you mean to tell me you didn’t run Doom on that?!
Almrond@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Haha, unfortunately no. None of the blades used a windowing system, so we technically wouldn’t have been able to as there is no graphical output (well, the IPMI controllers could have, but that’s kind of cheating). Although, as I’m thinking about it… We probably could have run it over ASCII graphics in a terminal… Man, that was a bit of a wasted opportunity, weather modelling is boring as hell.