

NASA unplugs last mainframe - coondoggie
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-unplugs-last-mainframe

======
moe
_$700,000 each year for maintenance and support_

Holy crap. IBM really knows how to negotiate support contracts...

For reference: The z9 maxes out at 512G RAM and 54 CPUs. In a slightly
apples/oranges-comparison you could buy the equivalent in pizza-boxes _every
month_ using just the above support-fee. With spare change.

~~~
gaius
... And then spend the same again on fabric to support that much I/O.
Supercomputers/clusters for compute, mainframes for IOPS.

~~~
justincormack
"A supercomputer is way to turn a CPU bound problem into an IO bound problem"
as the saying goes.

------
oomkiller
I bought one of NASA MSFC's old "mainframes" a few years ago, just for fun. It
was huge and I didn't have three phase power so I was never able to turn it
on, but it was cool to take it apart and examine all of the cards that they
were using, and see all of the engineering and design of a million dollar
computer. It was an SGI Challenge 10000XL "Rackmount" that was fully loaded, I
paid $25 for it. It was utterly huge, it was the size of a refrigerator and
the weight of a small car.

~~~
pestaa
Ever thought of donating it to a museum? I mean, I don't see much use in it,
apart from showing it to your grandchildren someday.

~~~
oomkiller
There aren't many computer museums around Alabama, and it was cost prohibitive
to ship it _anywhere_ as it weighed close to 2000 lbs. Anyways, I was able to
find a buyer at $700, and the guy even came and picked it up :)

~~~
xxpor
2000 lbs? Holy crap.

Where was all the weight? Did they use a 1/4 in steel case or something?

~~~
oomkiller
The case was pretty thick, maybe not 1/4in but about 2-3mm. A lot of the
weight came from the power supplies though, it had 3 48V monstrosities that
put out a total of 1900W IIRC. Plus there were disk carriages, a squirrel cage
cooling fan, and about what seemed like 100 boards that connected to a common
"backplane" for IO and power. It added up to be pretty heavy.

------
pmarin
The original post: [http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/NASA-CIO-
Blog/posts/post_13290...](http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/NASA-CIO-
Blog/posts/post_1329017818806.html)

~~~
buckwild
This line made my day:

Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today,
“there’s an app for it!”

------
sargun
Mainframes are awesome tools. I'm curious as to what NASA's computing fabrics
look like today - commodity hardware, or typical "Big Enterprise" - dumb,
monolithic systems.

~~~
emkemp
The high-performance computing systems at NASA Goddard are described here:

<http://www.nccs.nasa.gov/systems.html>

And the resources at NASA Ames are described here:

<http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/environment.html>

------
Craiggybear
Well, they could just build supercomputers from off-the-shelf parts and Linux.
Like everyone else seems to be doing these days.

Mainframes have magnificent reliability, uptime and throughput, though, and
I'm not sure how a commodity stack compares to that. Modern, cheap hardware is
pretty reliable, though. The LHC uses a lot of it in huge Linux farms with
MySQL (amongst other things) for data storage.

~~~
kakali
They do, hence Pleiades, the 7th fastest supercomputer.
<http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html>

~~~
Craiggybear
Yes, I knew about that. It is cheaper and more productive (almost certainly
for their needs) to just keep doing this.

$700,000 a year that would otherwise be spent on mainframe upkeep buys a _lot_
of hardware.

------
outside1234
is it any wonder we are going broke in this country when we are still spending
$30000 a year to power one computer that probably has 1/2 the computational
power of an iphone?

~~~
codergirl
NASA just needs a bigger budget... [http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-
conditioning-our-military-cos...](http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-
our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget)

~~~
wisty
That figure is mostly the costs of running logistical chains in dangerous
areas. It includes soldiers lost to attacks on convoys.

I doubt that less convoys will equal fewer attacks - it's just an accounting
quirk that the casualties are apportioned to the fuel. The attacks might be
less successful, as you won't be spreading the defence so thin, but you
wouldn't get a linear reduction in costs.

