[Beowulf] RE: MS Cray

[Lux, James P]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Naveed Near-Ansari [mailto:naveed at caltech.edu]
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 4:13 PM
> To: Lux, James P
> Cc: David Mathog; beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] RE: MS Cray
>
>
> On Sep 17, 2008, at 11:39 AM, Lux, James P wrote:
> >
> >
> > A big disadvantage of in-house is that it leads to an inventory of
> > ancient gear that becomes hard to maintain, and balkanized
> ownership
> > (we bought that for Project X, and though Project X is long
> gone, the
> > former staff of Project X still owns it). A big advantage
> of in- house
> > is that you can walk across the street and pick up an oscilloscope.
> >
> > Jim
>
> We had some issues with these NASA owned machines in the
> previous department i worked for. Because of arcane rules of
> ownership and what could be done with these machines, they
> sat in a closet for years (they may still be there) because
> noone knew what could be legally done with these extrememly
> outdated and useless machines.
>
> Naveed
>

And with NASA exploration missions, you may need to keep ancient gear "under glass" for a long time, to support some spacecraft that was launched 30 years ago (Voyager 1&2 are still going strong, eh?).  Some anomaly occurs, you need to drag out the testbed and the test equipment that was connected to the test bed, etc.  Maybe all your test data is stored on diskettes that were written by the Apple II that was the instrument controller.


James Lux, P.E.
Task Manager, SOMD Software Defined Radios
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive, Mail Stop 161-213
Pasadena, CA, 91109
+1(818)354-2075 phone
+1(818)393-6875 fax