It’s kind of lame that they need to junk the entire apparatus after only a decade. I get that processor technology moves on apace but we already know it does that so why doesn’t a universal architecture exist where nodes can be added at will?
It’s more of an operating cost issue. It’s almost decade-old hardware. It was efficient in its day, but compared to new hardware it just costs so much to run you would be better served investing in something with modern efficiency. It won’t be junked, it will be parted out. If you are someone that wants a cheap homelab with infiniband and shitloads of memory you could pick up a blade for a fraction of what it would otherwise cost. I fully expect it to turn into thousands of reasonably powerful servers for the prosumer and nerd markets instead of running as a monolithic cluster.
If you have too many “slow” modes in a super computer you’ll hit a performance ceiling where everything is bottle necked by the speed of things that are not the CPU: memory, disk for swap, and network for sending partial results across nodes for further partial computing.
Source: I’ve hang up too much around people doing PhD thesis in these kinds of problems.
It’s kind of lame that they need to junk the entire apparatus after only a decade. I get that processor technology moves on apace but we already know it does that so why doesn’t a universal architecture exist where nodes can be added at will?
It’s more of an operating cost issue. It’s almost decade-old hardware. It was efficient in its day, but compared to new hardware it just costs so much to run you would be better served investing in something with modern efficiency. It won’t be junked, it will be parted out. If you are someone that wants a cheap homelab with infiniband and shitloads of memory you could pick up a blade for a fraction of what it would otherwise cost. I fully expect it to turn into thousands of reasonably powerful servers for the prosumer and nerd markets instead of running as a monolithic cluster.
A decade is a lifetime in technology. Moore’s law had just ended when this was put together.
If you have too many “slow” modes in a super computer you’ll hit a performance ceiling where everything is bottle necked by the speed of things that are not the CPU: memory, disk for swap, and network for sending partial results across nodes for further partial computing.
Source: I’ve hang up too much around people doing PhD thesis in these kinds of problems.