Winner looking at his electricity bill:
Hey, I have worked on this exact machine before, neat to see they are finally decommissioning it. It would be a terrible purchase to actually use these days though, for the cost of moving and deploying it you could rock a few Hopper or Grace clusters that would outperform the cluster for less than half of the operating overhead.
I fully expect it to get parted out, the actual components would be far more useful on their own as cheap homelab systems, and would be a much better ROI versus using it as is. This thing is water cooled, just the plumbing would be a nightmare to deal with if you aren’t set up for it, and if you are you would be better off going with a modern architecture anyway.
What were you using it for?
We were running meteorological models mostly, but I did have a colleague that was trying to use it to predict wildlife migratory patterns using topographical mapping. It was batched out on a few projects at any given time while I was there, it was essentially timeshares between a few different research departments.
Damn that’s crazy. When I was just out of college I built the touchscreen web app that promoted this thing in the lobby of UCAR. Looks like it’s still running for now: https://hpctv.ucar.edu