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nthompson | 6 years ago

They do not have their own power station. They have the Bull Run coal plant and hydro plants in the area. They do coordinate with TVA before a run.

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petschge|6 years ago

They might coordinate with TVA for transients (i.e. going from an idle machine to a full-machine run), but in normal operations these systems are at least 50% full. In my experience as a user these machines are more than 80% most of the time. I don't have hard numbers on the average utilization over the last week/month/year (these might even be classified), but you don't by and build such a machine to be idle.

I could find the numbers for two German super computers I have used in the past. SuperMUC (Phase 1 and 2 combined) had "above the desired 85%" utilization in 2017 and Hazel Hen at HLRS in Stuttgart reported a utilization "between 92% and 98%" in 2017.

nthompson|6 years ago

> When I took a tour of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility a few years ago, Buddy Bland, who is Project Director, told me he could tell when he comes to the Lab in the morning if they are running the LINPACK benchmark by looking at how much steam is coming out of the cooling towers.

https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2013/06/24/the-linpack-ben...

Different programs consume dramatically different amounts of power.