WHAT HAPPENS TO DEAD SUPERCOMPUTERS?
Judging by the speed at which old supercomputers become obsolete (their average life expectancy is three years before an upgrade), and new champions rise to the top of the speed charts, you might expect there to be a boneyard in the Nevada desert, such as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group that mothballs old military equipment.
Alas, not. Old supercomputers don’t just die, they get well and truly taken apart. The ILLIAC II, for example, was disassembled roughly a decade after its construction and many faculty members took components home to keep. Donald B Gillies himself kept 12 modules, donating them back to the University of Illinois Computer Science department in 2006.
It’s not unheard of for piles of Xeons to appear on eBay following the dissolution of a supercomputer or datacentre, but more regularly these days the boards are sent for recycling. “There’s a lot of gold and valuable metals in there,” says Levesque.
“And there are people who recycle these old machines.”
Sexton’s experience is more brutal. “They typically get crushed,” he says. “In some of our contracts, we have a requirement to crush the parts after they’re done, because customers don’t want people going in and figuring out what they’ve been doing by reading back bits and bytes in memory.”
With new systems meaning more compute for the same power and the same price, there’s often no need to retain old systems, keeping one around and trying to restart it is just not worth it. Typically, hardware is disassembled and the remaining pieces are broken up and crushed. “There’s a lot of gold, silver, and rare earth minerals in there, and there are companies that specialize in retrieving them,” says Sexton.
Deep Blue was broken up with undue haste by IBM following its victory over Kasparov, and the story of the British government’s destruction of Colossus, broken into pieces no larger than a man’s fist and then kept secret for decades, reminds us that these huge, complex objects have a limited useful life.