For a mere $300,000...

Its amazing what happens when you start to be thought of as a real person in an organization. When I was a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (UNL) I was shielded from all the crap that faculty have to do in a day just to begin to do work. Now we're trying to buy hardware for our new USCMS Tier 2 facility (read that as supercomputer) and people are actually asking my opinion on what to buy (!).

Geez, what do I know about multiple processor clusters that the next guy doesn't know? All I know is people are asking me about how we should spend roughly a half a million dollars in the next 3 days. (!)

Its also amazing what kind of thinking has to go into buying your run of the mill supercomputer. We thought we could go with solution x, but solution x would saturate the cooling of the machine room, which we'd then have to replace. So, even though solution x was the cheapest bid, it would cost us $100,000 to upgrade the cooling and replace the facilities capabilities that we'd be tying up. Once you fold in $100K into any bid it stops being the cheapest. The stupid part is someone in facilities told the vendor that 'cooling wouldn't be a problem', then told US 'you know, cooling is going to be a problem'. Nice to know buddy. Now the vendor is going to be pissed when we don't go with their bid.

We're also in the market for some storage. We need about 10 - 15% of the total storage that we'll need in 2007. For you and me that 20-30 Terabytes. That's Tera. With a T. 1000 Gigabytes. You just don't go to bestbuy and pick up storage in the size range. We're hoping we can get that under $40,000 so that we don't have to send that out to bid because that would take too long.

Some day (next 1-2 years) we'll have to have 200 Terabytes ready to go. Mindboggling.

To top it all off, I have no earthly idea how to do anything useful with any of this stuff.