6 Jan
2017
6 Jan
'17
12:34 a.m.
On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:15:28PM +0000, Derek Fawcus wrote:
The Gould powernode was my first experience of unix at uni.
A Gould powernode (hostname = gouldorak) was sitting in the Computing
facility at my first work, with a VAX. The Gould load average was very
impressive, many huge pig processes (chemical simulations) were running
all time, but this machine crashed many times a week, system engineers
very busy at this time (fsck, restore, etc.).
The day a new Cray was installed, the main pig processes were migrated
to this new machine. From this day, the load average of the Gould, which
was still running, gone down. And the beast never crashed again. And
system engineers were no longer busy with the Gould.
Therefore, many chemists were confusing causality: they said that without
system engineer, a computer works better.
Pierre