There's one thing you're forgetting here: Cell architecture. Noone writes software for that anymore, since it's been discontinued (either officially or inofficially). Most new supercomputers at that scale are powered by a mix of NVIDIA Tesla (with Intel MIC now coming as well) and Opterons/Xeons. This dictates the software stack of present and future research[1]. There's no reason to keep a computer running when it's severely underused.
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There's one thing you're forgetting here: Cell architecture. Noone writes software for that anymore, since it's been discontinued (either officially or inofficially). Most new supercomputers at that scale are powered by a mix of NVIDIA Tesla (with Intel MIC now coming as well) and Opterons/Xeons. This dictates the software stack of present and future research[1]. There's no reason to keep a computer running when it's severely underused.
[1] Plug: That's also what I'm working on currently: https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran
Interesting project. Do you have a blog?
Thanks. Not yet, but soon at http://typhooncomputing.com.