I second this, would also ring my alarm bells in an interview. Back as a master student I went from a top 10 research university that didn't have a strong HPC i

I second this, would also ring my alarm bells in an interview. Back as a master student I went from a top 10 research university that didn't have a strong HPC infra at the time (ETH Zurich) to a top 100 one that did (Tokyo Tech), at least as a guest. Difference was staggering - all students just got handed a login on their big (top 100) cluster to be able to work with the actual hardware, even if limited to a couple of nodes. This much increased the likelihood that someone would be able to come up with an interesting project just together with their academic supervisor (no huge group projects with tons of extra funding needed).