Supercomputer Repossessed By State, May Be Sold In Pieces

1sockchuck writes "A supercomputer that was the third-fastest machine in the world in 2008 has been repossessed by the state of New Mexico and will likely be sold in pieces to three universities in the state. The state has been unable to find a buyer for the Encanto supercomputer, which was built and maintained with $20 million in state funding. The supercomputer had the enthusiastic backing of Gov. Bill Richardson, who saw the project as an economic development tool for New Mexico. But the commercial projects did not materialize, and Richardson's successor, Susana Martinez, says the supercomputer is a 'symbol of excess.'"

Comments

Re:Oh, boy!

[Immerman]

Actually, for learning how to do good supercomputer programming it might be quite viable. After all most beginner code is horribly inefficient, and most beginner projects are quite small. On anything resembling a "real" supercomputer even the most inefficient code will still finish within seconds - whereas on slow hardware with poor I/O a poorly coded implementation may take many minutes or even hours versus the seconds needed for a well-written program to do the same task. Technically speaking the difference between .1 seconds and 10 seconds is just as informative as the difference between 10 seconds and 17 minutes, but the latter carries far more psychological weight.

Besides which - how many entry-level tasks can you think of that could actually make use of even a few dozen clustered "real" systems, much less a thousand? Hands-on experience in how to effectively partition a task between numerous nodes shouldn't be underestimated, and it's a rare university that's going to want to turn beginning programmers loose on their big iron, other departments want to use it for real research. A $30-50k cluster on the other hand might be just what the CS department ordered.