My Tech Life: ‘Sir, please step out of the supercomputer’
Or why stepping over a multi-million dollar motherboard makes folks nervous
Starting in the early 1980s, I’d begun writing the weekly San Diego On-Line column for ComputorEdge Magazine, as well as updating and maintaining their local BBS listing. (To this day, I’m more known for that gig than anything else I’ve done.) By the late ’90s, the focus of the column had moved from reviewing local dial-up bulletin board systems to reviewing local Web sites, and I had built up a pretty good network of connections in the local tech sector.
One day, I read that the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD was going to be part of the new Internet2 then being built around a national fiber optic network. They had also recently acquired one of the first terabyte storage systems for the Adam and Eve project, where medical researchers ran thousands of CT scans of both a male and a female cadaver — resulting in massive data files that outstripped the currently available solutions.
I reached out to a contact over there and asked if I could get a behind-the-scenes tour. My contact said he’d be happy to show me around — and did I want to bring any guests?
So I asked a couple of the IT guys at the paper if they wanted to go see some supercomputers and other fun toys at UCSD — and quick got two “yesses” in response.
We got down there, got our visitor badges on, were shown the publicly accessible areas outside the glass-paneled inner sanctum — and then our host slid his security badge over the digital lock and ushered us into the large air-conditioned room that housed the supercomputers.
They lifted some floor panels to show us the Internet2 backbone — a cable of fiber optics as think as a grown man’s thigh.
There was also a Cray supercomputer, I think, with a liquid freon waterfall on the front panel as part of its cooling system. They also had a wall of large old-school televisions mounted on the wall in a 4x4 array to create a virtual video display that had to have been 6 feet by 6 feet if not more.
And we got to see the 1 TB storage system — a kind of data juke box, except instead of robotic arms grabbing a requested record to play, robotic arms would grab 1 of several hundred tape storage cartridges, take it to have new data written to it, then return it to its spot in the large case, which was about the size of an old cigarette vending machine.
But their pride and joy was a Tera MTA supercomputer they’d recently acquired. It didn’t look like the other supercomputers in that room — this thing was sleek. Our guide said he’d heard that Tera hired designers from luxury sports car companies to make their cases, because when donors gave money to a university or research lab for a supercomputer, and came to visit and see what their donation had purchased, they wanted to see something visually striking — not row after row of servers in a rack.
Eager to impress his visitors, our guide removed one of the side panels on the Tera MTA — which stood almost 6 feet high, and was about 5 feet across.
Interestingly, most of the case inside was empty — there was a large motherboard lying horizontal at the base of the case, and that was most of the computer.
One of the IT guys — a self-taught genius who knew way more about computers than the university degreed folks above him on the company org chart — asked if it was okay to look inside. He possessed insatiable curiosity about all things computers, which is why he had been able to teach himself so much. I had never met anyone so at home in DOS / Windows, Mac and Unix, all at the same time.
Our SDSC host said sure, but our IT guy wanted a closer look than our host had anticipated — because he ducked inside the case and stepped over the motherboard, resting his foot on the other side of the case, to get a better look.
I think we were all surprised by this move — and our host paled noticeably, cleared his throat, and said rather loudly, “Sir, please step out of the supercomputer.”
I do not believe that those particular words in the English language have ever been strung together in that particular order before or since.
-30-
“Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?”
Hal 9000
"Sir, please step out of the supercomputer." That sounds like a great title for a short story. I wish I knew more about computers.