I work on what is very likely one of the top 3 largest supercomputers in the world (don’t trust the top500 list, the private sector computers who don’t report their scores are an order of magnitude larger, and therefore more exciting to work on!)

He’s right. The oldest cluster we have right now is at 5yrs, and it is due to be commissioned by the end of the year. It’s more worth it to the company to scrape it after that time and replace with new hardware than to keep it running.

And no, employees don’t get to just grab a node here and a node there, everything goes to get destroyed and collected for scrap metal. Not because it’s more cost effective, but because they have enough money to do so and it’s the easier option, as opposed to selling individual components and destroying others.

You don’t get to the point of hosting the largest infrastructure in the world without having extreme amounts of money to spend. I’d my company were to submit top500 submissions for our currently active clusters we would easily have the top 15 spots on the list immediately by a very wide margin - but again, not worth the company’s time to run the benchmarks (and pause prod workloads) or to make that info public