In 2008, the Encanto supercomputer was ranked third among the fastest computers in the world, now the state of New Mexico, that funded its construction and maintenance, will probably dismantle it and sell it in pieces.

In 2007, New Mexico approved the opening of the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in order to deal with various problems with the use a supercomputer. This center would work closely with federal, state and private companies providing them with the services of the Encanto supercomputer, which means rent its use for a certain amount of hours but also develop the software needed to solve a specific problem. The Encanto supercomputer was meant to be used also by New Mexico universities through the use of gateways.

The state of New Mexico funded the construction of the Encanto supercomputer with $11 million. In the following years, it paid $9 million for the maintenance of Encanto and to create the gateways with the state universities.

The Encanto supercomputer consists of SGI Altix ICE 8200 clusters which in theory can reach a peak performance of 172 TFlops. It has 1792 nodes with 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon quad core processors. The total RAM is 28.7 TBytes.

In 2011 a cost / benefit analysis of the use of supercomputer Encanto started and the New Mexico administration concluded that it didn’t produce sufficient revenues to repay the investment. Of course, you should review all the data to see whether there was too much optimism from the beginning or they made some mistakes in its management. The fact is that last summer it was decided to turn Encanto off and this has raised the issue of what to do with it.

Today Encanto isn’t even one of the 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world but it’s a supercomputer whose performance should be competitive for a few more years. The first intention was to sell it, for example to a university, but no buyer has come forward. At this point, it’s likely that Encanto will be sold in pieces.

Three New Mexico universities would like to split part of the racks, each containing 500 processors. Each rack can in fact be used independently or can be added to an existing computer system. It’s a good way to recycle the Encanto’s pieces.

This story is a lesson in the management of supercomputers. It’s nice to boast of having built one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world but the costs are very high, not only to build one but also to run it.

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