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It's interesting to read articles like this since I came from bizarro not-so-HPC world where "we" (academic department) didn't pay for electricity (the universi
by rwg 14y ago
It's interesting to read articles like this since I came from bizarro not-so-HPC world where "we" (academic department) didn't pay for electricity (the university did!), so there was no incentive at all to retire obsolete hardware. Right up until I left many months ago, I was running jobs on a cluster made up of 84 servers on death's door, each with dual-processor (not dual-core!) Nocona Xeons or Opteron 240s.
"Oh, but there's a cost to support obsolete hardware!" Yeah, sure, but the person supporting everything was me, and I was a constant cost to keep around whether I supported crappy obsolete hardware or shiny new hardware.
- happycube 14y agoYup, if you're not paying for power or space you can afford to keep those dinosaurs around, if they can do the job. Which they might still be able to do, just nowhere near as well as a Sandy Bridge E platform. Heck, some of the developers might prefer to use a Haswell+7990 in a few months over time on those things... if they can get one on their desk. Meanwhile in the colo world, everything up to Core 2 Xeons were being tossed out in lots when Nehalem came out because it was just that much more efficient.
- m_mueller 14y agoIn terms of age this system isn't a dinosaur - the problem is the hardware architecture as stated in the article: Cell is now obsolete, noone wants to program new software for it anymore. X86 systems on the other hand, even older ones, can still be targeted by new Software without problems, so it may still make sense to keep them. To be blunt, the accelerator market simply moved to NVIDIA Tesla.