i wonder how moore's law figured into the pricing - for a nuclear simulation, makes sense you'd want to pay a lot, or basic science or political things like apollo moon missions, but for weather or commercial applications, if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away, though there's marketing aspect of how advanced your product is.. maybe this was before moores law though
> if you wait a few years might not be worth to pay for cray right away
And then you don’t get anything done because there is always a better computer just around the corner. Most of the time, proposals are written for hardware that already exist and don’t need the absolute best. If you have some CFD or MHD calculations to do for a rocket engine or a nuclear reactor, you don’t care about the computer on which it ran, just that it ran on time and did not hold the whole project back. Even cutting edge science does not require cutting edge hardware most of the time.
Just like buying a desktop next year won’t help you play games today, at some point you have to settle and accept that your hardware will be outdated by the time it comes online (it’s a bit better now, but leading HPC clusters still get obsolesced quite quickly).
> maybe this was before moores law though
The exponential character of available CPU time on larger computers was apparent before Moore’s law.
