Winner looking at his electricity bill:
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. This thing is water cooled, just the plumbing would be a nightmare to deal with if you aren’t set up for it, and if you are you would be better off going with a modern architecture anyway.
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.
Power consumption: 1.7 MW
I hope it stays decommissioned. We’re burning up the planet too fast already, and old computers tend to be far less efficient than modern ones.
Yeah just need 10Mw+ of solar and like 40mwh of batteries to power it 24/7
The specs seem to be just enough to run a Minecraft server that doesn’t freeze when one player explores new chunks.
no use, minecraft server is single threaded. it won’t hit 20TPS in an even slightly complex world no matter how much compute you throw at it
Damn that’s crazy. When I was just out of college I built the touchscreen web app that promoted this thing in the lobby of UCAR. Looks like it’s still running for now: https://hpctv.ucar.edu
That is a really cool resume item, ngl
Do you mind me asking the languages/frameworks backing it? (e.g. JavaScript/Node)
