<story><title>World’s top supercomputer from ‘09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-from-09-is-now-obsolete-will-be-dismantled/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naftaliharris</author><text>Something about these numbers doesn&apos;t quite make sense. The reason cited for dismantling the machine is that &quot;it isn&apos;t energy-efficient enough to make the power bill worth it.&quot; But the supercomputer uses 2345 kilowatts, which at US prices of around 15 cents per kWh would cost $352 / hour to run in energy costs. By comparison, the $120 million cost of building roadrunner, amortized over the four years it&apos;s been running, comes out to $3400 / hour. The article makes it sound like the power bill is costing them a fortune, at $3 million a year, it isn&apos;t that much at all next to the $120 million price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davidmr</author><text>Disclaimer: while I worked for a DOE supercomputing lab, it wasn&apos;t one of the NNSA (nuke) labs, so I don&apos;t have all the info. (And even if I did, I certainly wouldn&apos;t be allowed to comment on it.)&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re a bit right in that it&apos;s more complicated than they say in the article. The power of keeping it up and running is definitely costly, but there&apos;s more to it than that.&lt;p&gt;* It takes people to run it. They&apos;re expensive, and you don&apos;t want your people wasting a lot of time on the old super while your new one is being installed and accepted. I don&apos;t recall having seen any plans for a new super at LANL, but there&apos;s probably something new showing up soon.&lt;p&gt;* The architecture of roadrunner is outdated and obsolete. The NNSA isn&apos;t buying any more, and you can bet that with the new Blue Gene/Q at Lawrence Livermore (sequoia), all their new code is being written for different non-roadrunner architectures. There is considerable cost to porting new code to legacy hardware.&lt;p&gt;* Kind of in line with the last point, sequoia is &amp;#62;17x faster than roadrunner at only 3.5x the power. There&apos;s not a lot of point in paying such a premium in flops/watt by running on roadrunner since the new one is already online.&lt;p&gt;* 2.3MW is only what the computer itself uses.  There&apos;s a ton of other supporting equipment needed to use it (chillers, disk, control nodes, etc.)&lt;p&gt;* This computer isn&apos;t being manufactured anymore, so maintenance is going to cost a fortune. When they bought it, they either paid for a hardware support contract or bought a ton of spares and did self-maintenance. If they did the former, IBM is either charging through the nose for replacements or refusing to support it outright. If they did the latter, they&apos;re probably running low on spares.</text></comment>
<story><title>World’s top supercomputer from ‘09 is now obsolete, will be dismantled</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-from-09-is-now-obsolete-will-be-dismantled/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naftaliharris</author><text>Something about these numbers doesn&apos;t quite make sense. The reason cited for dismantling the machine is that &quot;it isn&apos;t energy-efficient enough to make the power bill worth it.&quot; But the supercomputer uses 2345 kilowatts, which at US prices of around 15 cents per kWh would cost $352 / hour to run in energy costs. By comparison, the $120 million cost of building roadrunner, amortized over the four years it&apos;s been running, comes out to $3400 / hour. The article makes it sound like the power bill is costing them a fortune, at $3 million a year, it isn&apos;t that much at all next to the $120 million price tag.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noahdesu</author><text>The tri-labs have a rotating schedule for acquiring new machines, that include capacity and capability classes (the later being RR). The last time I was in the computing center at LANL the computing floor was quite packed. So, regardless of the claims made in the article for disposal reasons, there are other issues such as total machine weight, cooling requirements (which dominate), making room for new machines, etc...&lt;p&gt;I do not know if RR will be physically shredded, but I&apos;m hoping that it is retired to the brand-new PRObE (&lt;a href=&quot;http://nmc-probe.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://nmc-probe.org/&lt;/a&gt;) computing center where RR would be available for use by academic researchers.</text></comment>