CIOReview
| | May 20168CIOReviewIn MyOpinionovernment and industry alike invest heavily in massive computer systems to satisfy the insatiable demand for compute power of today's society. Compared to other types of equip-ment, computers have an unusual-ly short life-span. After only a few years of operation most computers are replaced with faster, better, systems. With all this hard-ware being continuously decommissioned, where does it all go?Government, industry, and research facilities keep building larger and faster supercomputers, which is a natural effect of trying to keep up with the ever growing demand for compute cycles to perform critical scientific calculations required to ensure the safety of our nation or the profitability of a company. The technology competi-tion is essentially a modern version of the space race that occurred during the cold war as the country with the fast-est computer will perform the most advanced science. As these massive computer systems are built and put into pro-duction, the "Top 500" list reveals the current state of the race at a SuperComputing conference every six months. For the last three years, China's "Tianhe-2" computer sys-tem with a peak 54.9 PetaFLOPS (Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second) in is the lead, followed by the U.S. Department of Energy - Oak Ridge National Labora-tory system called "Titan" at roughly half the performance of its Chinese counterpart. Running these systems require several MegaWatts of power and cost millions of dollars a year to operate. In industry, massive corporations like Google, Amazon, and Facebook build their own data cen-ters around the world to supply enough compute power to meet the needs of their hundreds of millions of users. Each of these types of data centers can host tens of thou-sands of individual computers often referred to as nodes. A node is at least as powerful your average office / home computer. Many have co-processors (like GPUs or Xeon Phi's) to speed up calculations; some have disk, and most have fast networking capabilities. The end result is a mas-sive amount of hardware that has one thing in common - at some point, inevitably - each and every node needs to be discarded. Live or Let Die? Andree Jacobson, CIO for the New Mexico Consortium (NMC) focuses on the fate of these decommissioned su-percomputers. He is the project manager for PRObE (The Parallel Reconfigurable Observational Environment) which is an NSF funded compute facility hosted by the NMC in Los Alamos, NM. The NMC is a non-profit organization with a purpose to improve the research en-vironment in New Mexico by facilitating collaborations between Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the three research universities in the state. PRObE is a pilot project designed to determine the feasibility of us-The technology competition is essentially a modern version of the space race that occurred during the cold war as the country with the fastest computer will perform the most advanced scienceRepurposing Supercomputers--What Happens on "The Other Side?"By Andree Jacobson, CIO, New Mexico Consortium & Project Manager, PRObE
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