Labs Keep Supercomputers Alive For Ten Years As Vendors Pull Support Early
HPCwire, Wednesday, June 12th, 2024
Laboratories are running supercomputers for much longer, beyond the typical lifespan, as vendors prematurely deprecate the hardware and stop providing support.
A typical supercomputer lifecycle is about five to six years. However, Japan-based RIKEN is planning to run its existing Fugaku for ten years, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) has some systems running for 7-10 years in some cases.
'We plan on extending the lifetime of our machines,' said Satoshi Matsuoka, director at Japan's RIKEN Center for Computational Science, during a panel discussion on sustainability of supercomputing at ISC 2024.
Panel members, which included some top names from supercomputing labs, criticized vendors for purposefully deprecating hardware early on and called for an end to this practice.