The speed of obsolescence

For sale: Cheyenne Supercomputer.

OPINION | TECH TALK If there’s one thing we know about PC hardware, it’s that it becomes outdated. The Cheyenne supercomputer is testament to the rapid improvements over the past decade in the world of extreme scalability, coupled with a warning about things not always going as planned. Apparently, ongoing reliability, repair, and maintenance issues reached the point where the best option was to pull the plug and start afresh. Deployed in 2016, Cheyenne was the year’s 21st fastest supercomputer, with a score of 4.79 petaflops. Today, it’s number 160 on the Top500 list – or was prior to being decommissioned. While it’s not clear how much it cost, it replaced one that was around US$25–$30 million, and its Derecho replacement is an HP-built setup that cost US$35–$40 million. It…

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APC (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2024

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