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sfackler

It was shut down a week or so ago because it's too energy inefficient:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/worlds-first-petascale-supercomputer-will-be-shredded-to-bits/

fangyihua

Question: Who demands supercomputers other than the scientific community? A few days ago, this question came to my mind. We always want better performance and better performance comes with costs. In most cases in daily life, we do not demand these much computing power at this speed. So, is there any other uses for supercomputers other than for the scientific community?

abunch

@Fangyihua: There may be some companies that use them for various things but a lot of it comes from national pride, many countries(and states for that matter) put money into them so they can brag, saying things like "We had to build a supercomputer that does X petaflops because of all the interesting things our universities/scientists are doing!".

Here is an interesting story that goes along with this from when I was at Ohio State. So Ohio State has access to the Ohio Supercomputing Center (OSC) in much the same way CMU can access PSC/blacklight, there was some major revamp that was needed(probably costing a few million dollars) and after some convincing someone got a big wig (not the governor but close) to speak on the OSC's behalf on a budget meeting. Eventually OSC got a good chunk of change and once the revamps were finished the official that spoke on our behalf came to visit. I suppose he really had no idea what a supercomputer looked like because he left feeling completely underwhelmed because he expected something a lot more than a room of server blades and made some comment like "If I knew it would look so boring I wouldn't have helped" and I believe he was planning on using it as a thing to show important people when they needed to see something cool Columbus had to offer.

abunch

And also tagging onto what @sfackler said, I went to IEEE HOT Interconnects conference in 2011 and one of the speakers from Intel made a pretty good argument semi-against how we were shooting towards exoscale computing at the time. He mentioned that even taking into account how much more power efficient we are becoming every year, it is entirely likely that a real exoscale supercomputer would need its own power plant unless some serious ground was covered in making CPU/GPU's and other components consume less power.