Almrond

Oooo, this one actually happened to me. Head on collision with a barrier at 80mph, fell asleep at the wheel after getting out of a 27 day stint in the ICU. Dare To Be Stupid by Weird Al was playing when i collided.

Magic talkers. Artificers are magic tinkerers, mages are magic soldiers, hags are magic gardeners, the list goes on I’m sure.

It would be really neat to see the differences between instances that take part in the polls, I think it would work fine.

A lot of modern places use shibboleth and 2FA keys these days, but the military still uses smart card authentication

I’m guilty of that, I overuse commas like crazy. I’m trying to just stop using ellipsis entirely and move the content I want to say into a different sentence. It’s a hard habit to break.

Haha, unfortunately no. None of the blades used a windowing system, so we technically wouldn’t have been able to as there is no graphical output (well, the IPMI controllers could have, but that’s kind of cheating). Although, as I’m thinking about it… We probably could have run it over ASCII graphics in a terminal… Man, that was a bit of a wasted opportunity, weather modelling is boring as hell.

We were running meteorological models mostly, but I did have a colleague that was trying to use it to predict wildlife migratory patterns using topographical mapping. It was batched out on a few projects at any given time while I was there, it was essentially timeshares between a few different research departments.

It’s more of an operating cost issue. It’s almost decade-old hardware. It was efficient in its day, but compared to new hardware it just costs so much to run you would be better served investing in something with modern efficiency. It won’t be junked, it will be parted out. If you are someone that wants a cheap homelab with infiniband and shitloads of memory you could pick up a blade for a fraction of what it would otherwise cost. I fully expect it to turn into thousands of reasonably powerful servers for the prosumer and nerd markets instead of running as a monolithic cluster.

Hey, I have worked on this exact machine before, neat to see they are finally decommissioning it. It would be a terrible purchase to actually use these days though, for the cost of moving and deploying it you could rock a few Hopper or Grace clusters that would outperform the cluster for less than half of the operating overhead.

I fully expect it to get parted out, the actual components would be far more useful on their own as cheap homelab systems, and would be a much better ROI versus using it as is. This thing is water cooled, just the plumbing would be a nightmare to deal with if you aren’t set up for it, and if you are you would be better off going with a modern architecture anyway.

Kind of, you would use a deployment node to manage the individual blades, they are running really specialized software that is basically useless without the management nodes. It wouldn’t be difficult to spin it up (Terascale would have it ready to batch out jobs within a few hours) but you are going to need to engineer your building around it to even get that far. Your foundation needs to support multiple tons of weight, be perfectly level, be able to deliver megawatts of power, remove megawatts of heat (it is water cooled, so you need to have infrastructure and cooling towers to handle that), and you need to be able to get it into the building to begin with. I have worked on this system a few times, just moving it would literally cost upwards of 7 figures. The computer is pretty easy to use, it’s all of the supporting infrastructure that will need a literal team of engineers. I could (and have, kind of) spin the machine up to start crunching data within a day on my own. Fuck moving it, and double fuck re-cabling it. Literal miles of fiber in those racks.

You do literally pop in an image that is pre-configured in and it deploys to everything at once. That’s probably the easiest part of the whole setup.

DHT is an identifying protocol by design, it is how people find you to send/receive data. If your connection to the swarm is anonymized there really isn’t a ton the AI is going to be able to do that isn’t already happening with traditional methods.

It is, but I can see a few use cases that could make it useful. Namely, it can look for common scam/virus patterns to filter more effectively and offer better content suggestions. There are also cases to be made for more descriptive indexing and content identification: lots of torrents have particularly bad naming schemes or misspellings that make finding the content somewhat more difficult or involved.