Misconception
As a person who works an Ames and routinely uses super computers all over the world I'd like to point out a few misconceptions.
They commonly refer to these big machines as being used for a certain task but in reality 100's of jobs are running on them at any one time. The jobs can be from all different types of disciplines ranging from atmospheric science to rotorcraft aerodynamics to biological systems modeling. In addition many jobs are run by university students who are given computer time as part of their research on government contracts.
In reality, I'd say less than 5% of the time on the new computer will be spent supporting missions to space but that doesn't mean the machine will not be put to good use. It is just easier to sell the idea to funding sources by associating a sexy task with it.
For those gamers out there:
The machines have no graphics cards on them. All the data is transferred back to work stations for the post processing of results and visualization. The machines sole purpose is to crunch numbers as fast as possible.
To the Windows person:
Windows is far from ideal when most of the code is written in Fortran and C using MPI or OpenMP for parallelization.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
