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Ask HN: What to Do with an Old Supercomputer?

3 points by speedgoose ↗ HN
If you stumbled upon a 10 years old retired supercomputer on the side of the street, what would you do?

The nodes are outdated xeon but you have hundred of them. It uses a lot more electricity than a newer supercomputer but the hardware has been built so it may not be so bad for the environment to use it a few more years. The electricity bill is going to be much much cheaper than similarly sized clusters in the public cloud but still significant.

Would you turn around and pretend you never seen it, or do you have suggestions about some useful things that can be done with it?

10 comments

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abudabi123
Zero cost the energy bill with solar power on Antarctica network accessed via Starlink. Ensure you have enough spare parts for the Old Supercomputer to run continously without any down time for 10 years more. Model the connectome of the recently released fruitfly but model a nest of social insects with a purpose. Use the resulting model to firefight extreme climate at the control of swarming drones waterbombing heatmap points of interest.
jareds
I'd try to determine all I could about the hardware before possibly taking it. If the hardware could be scavenged or individual nodes were useful I'd try to break it down and sell it on ebay. I don't have the money or electrical service to run a data center in my basement. Even if I did my wife and children would not be allow it.
compressedgas
Stand there wondering how I'm going to move this thousands of pounds of equipment before the trash pick up comes.
speedgoose
You can rent a truck and call a few friends. It’s not that big.
PaulHoule
Got a place to put it? Got a truck to haul it?

Break it up into individual nodes and sell the ones you don’t have a use for on Ebay.

h2odragon
Not a supercomputer, but heavy metal: I have a sun 4/490 [1] carcass on my porch that i got in similar circumstances. Never actually powered it up, but it donated a lot of hardware to later systems. Actual metal bits hardware, disk racks and i carved up the power supplies and some other stuff for parts.

The rack is still a favored spot for cats to sun themselves, 20+ years on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-4

dekhn
I would have it stripped down and sent to electronics recycling. It's not cost-effective.
speedgoose
It’s magnitudes cheaper than the cloud though.
dekhn
if your space, power, networking, and support staff are all "free" it might be cheaper.

Supercomputers are ferraris. You're pouring gas into them to drive them at 200MPH all the time. Cloud is 18 wheeler with a switch that makes it disappear when you're not moving stuff.