[Beowulf] MS Cray

[Tim Cutts]

On 16 Sep 2008, at 11:07 pm, Lux, James P wrote:

> There is a huge psychological advantage to having the computer  
> physically under your management and control.  You don't have folks  
> trying to "optimize the use of a valuable institutional resource"  
> with scheduling, etc.  You might be willing to tolerate a factor of  
> 2 hit in performance for the ability to not have to account for  
> anyone else about how much you're using or not using it.

And then they all expect the central systems support group to get it  
running for them, and to fix it when it breaks, and to generally  
maintain it.  Suddenly you have dozens of completely different systems  
scattered far and wide across your site, and you're starting to get  
complaints that the support group are unobtainable these days -  
they're never at their desk any more, and don't seem to have any time  
to build new stuff any more.

Tim


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