On 9/22/21 4:00 PM, Mike Willegal via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Still useful c6500s may be, but Cisco has published an EOL plan for this product that pretty much gives you no options for HW support or SW support, so in you would be pretty much dependent upon resale market for spares and such. Not the type of thing most businesses want to deal with as a critical part of their operations.
Well, with apologies Mike, you'd be wrong there. Some businesses, sure, but by no means all, and I would say not even close to "most" or even "many". I see them everywhere. A comparatively small percentage of Cisco-based networks have, can afford, or even care about, Cisco service contracts. Spares are readily available everywhere, from authorized Cisco dealers with warranties, or even on the surplus market for people with more brains than money. And, software support? That's a bit of a joke on systems like this. Heck, there's a first-gen 6513 moving data in the main datacenter at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, I wasn't terribly surprised to see it there two months ago, loaded with 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces, right between two of the latest and most powerful computers on the planet. I don't often wear my "network engineer" hat anymore, but it still fits, and I do manage quite a bit of this type of hardware for our networks as well as corporate clients. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On 9/22/21 4:12 PM, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
two months ago, loaded with 10 gigabit Ethernet interfaces, right between two of the latest and most powerful computers on the planet.
They need to get some faster nics in those supercomputers! This ain't 2010!
That's for off-net file transfer. Their interconnects are mostly 200 gigabit Infiniband. They donated a lot of their 100 gigabit OPA interconnect hardware to LSSM not long ago. PSC is not living in the past, man. And as far as "support", Cisco, like IBM, will support *anything* regardless of it's EOL status if there's cash involved. I replaced and decommissioned a Catalyst 5000 (not 5500, 5000, circa 1994!) about two years ago that was still under active Cisco support with a 3hr-response contract. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
They still use SGI Challenges at PSC?
On Sep 22, 2021, at 4:09 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
right between two of the latest and most powerful computers on the planet.
Oh I thought you said most powerful power consumers on the planet... -andy
On 9/22/21 4:17 PM, Andrew Diller wrote:
They still use SGI Challenges at PSC?
SGI CHallenges? Wow. No, those were gone in the 1990s.
On Sep 22, 2021, at 4:09 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
right between two of the latest and most powerful computers on the planet.
Oh I thought you said most powerful power consumers on the planet...
That too. You should see the power rooms in that place, holy crap!! -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Wed, 22 Sep 2021, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 9/22/21 4:17 PM, Andrew Diller wrote:
They still use SGI Challenges at PSC?
SGI CHallenges? Wow. No, those were gone in the 1990s.
On Sep 22, 2021, at 4:09 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
right between two of the latest and most powerful computers on the planet.
Oh I thought you said most powerful power consumers on the planet...
That too. You should see the power rooms in that place, holy crap!!
Hopefully, a bit more modern than the 3MW SAGE setup. :-) http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/All5DieselGenerators.jpg http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/DieselGenerator.jpg Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
On 9/22/21 4:33 PM, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Oh I thought you said most powerful power consumers on the planet...
That too. You should see the power rooms in that place, holy crap!!
Hopefully, a bit more modern than the 3MW SAGE setup. :-)
http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/All5DieselGenerators.jpg http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/DieselGenerator.jpg
HOLY CRAP!! -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
Hopefully, a bit more modern than the 3MW SAGE setup. :-) http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/All5DieselGenerators.jpg http://q7.neurotica.com/Q7/DieselGenerator.jpg
https://blog.equinix.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Generator2.jpg Same idea, bigger scale :-) I think Equnix DC6/11 in Ashburn has ~40 megawatts of diesel generator. Two buildings connected. The way they work is they might have say Qty 6 x 3 megawatt generators, they will all fire up in an outage, sync up then the system will shed ones it doesn't need. Then if one were to go offline it can bring in another one. That is two buildings, Equinix has like 15+ in Northern VA area now. AWS has over 100. Then there are a bunch of other players like Cyrus and DRT and the like. That is a lot of Caterpillar generators! 6+ per facility, over 200 facilities in Northern VA alone. 350 E Cermak in Chicago, it's a beautiful building that used to be a printing company that printed Sears catalogs and phone books (ironic.) Now it's a data center, and it has 100 megawatts of generator power in house!! A nuclear reactor is 600 megawatts I think. It's pretty crazy. But look up the building, and look up the library in it -- totally Harry Potter esque. Library: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7xFT-vnC8p4/XkDFBl1wnaI/AAAAAAABoY4/oi4sDMcU0fQak... 350 E Cermak DC: https://images1.loopnet.com/i2/vMaNUeCCQsJ1iEwMNwuMGmCiBnFlQpNMxrvw6-nz9XA/1...
participants (4)
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Andrew Diller -
Dave McGuire -
Ethan O'Toole -
Mike Loewen