You know that Emacs has been able to let you use the tab key to insert the correct number of spaces for the current line for probably 30 years, right? I suspect that Vim can do it, too.

The 36-port part is the ASIC. The switch boxes have a lot more ports.

Not that it changes your argument, but you should know that NCSA has a brand new Altix.

It appears to be the latter. The spec is available here. NCSA negotiated a system with IBM, proposed it to NSF under the above linked RFP, went through a peer-reviewed awards process, negotiated an award with NSF, and started working on the delivery and other aspects with IBM and NCSA's other partners. Something went wrong in the last several months, and IBM's pull out was the result. I doubt that there is any more money to be found, and all parties knew what was asked of them in order for the project to be successful.

Have you tried it off-node?

Have you tried fitting a water block in a blade lately? How about 2000 of them? :)

Given that you can lay two of these racks back to back and then run them end to end, and that you can remove most of the regular AC equipment from your room, the amount of stuff you can get in your datacenter is the same.

It's 3% on my Citibank card here in the US. That's the normal rate for US-based banks for foreign transactions, BTW.

You don't understand how this works. You do the computation ahead of time on the supercomputer to build your reduced order model which you download onto your phone and take out into the field. Once you've downloaded the model, you don't need the supercomputer any more. You can use the phone to do computations using the reduced model as much as you like. If you get into a regime where the predicted error from the reduced order model is too high, you can go back to the supercomputer and update the model. If that happens, then you'll probably have to wait in queue again, but that's not such a big deal.

You might find this interesting.