i completely agree. while there is a lot of science that gets done, supercomputing is largely image driven. however, supercomputing is really a losing game. by

i completely agree. while there is a lot of science that gets done, supercomputing is largely image driven. however, supercomputing is really a losing game. by the time you've gone you're in the second year of a project, over budget, behind schedule, and you're just trying to make sure you don't lose too much on the deal - doing the design, engineering and fabrication for a super cool faring isn't anywhere near the top of your list...and if it was, its not anymore i guess the other problem is that you're already spending a lot of engineering to get that information into some other system for display and analysis. its actually a lot more effective to look at a visualization of the overall thermal map (or power, or network queue depths, or...) than to have colored leds on the chassis. but i used to sit in front of a connection machine all day, and i could tell what was running and how different it was from the admittedly very low bandwidth front led display. and it made great pictures. and since they were card edge on the actual boards with a diffuser in front on slides...it was likely much less than %1 of cost.