These are my own hazy opinions, but I suspect it starts at "Wallet vaporizes from shock" and goes up from there.
I remember reading about how old IBM mainframes used to have a couple ThinkPads (literally two, for redundancy) bolted just inside the cabinet door, just to change low-level configuration settings. It seems to me that these POWER8 boxen are aimed toward that end of the market.
YouTube's history interface is terrible, but I managed to dig this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOzPTopt7HE - which shows the different discrete components in a POWER8 system and how they're put together. I should probably do a bit more research on this, that video is quite basic (and 2 years old now).
POWER8 systems seem to necessarily take up a lot of space, and not does this contributes to the raw material cost, it's also a factor in renting, considering that you can pack a basic but decent punch with 1U or 2U of x86. My guess is that IBM isn't trying to be competitive here, but aim for a specific market. That'll influence the price too.
It's thanks to market factors and the state of education (which sometimes produces wins like these!) that places like PTOpenLab exist, I think (again, this is an [un]educated guess), and I'm super appreciative that they do. I haven't figured out how the "blue points" system works yet though (you get 500, and use 10/day for running a VM); I can at least say that the number doesn't increase each day. I vaguely recall reading something to the effect of creating HDD images for the platform would give you points based on how many other people downloaded them (there's somewhere you can upload to), but I can't find that documentation now.
Another fun tidbit: the dashboard UI is based on SmartAdmin (a premium jQuery plugin, apparently), which comes with Chrome-compatible voice control (note the mic button at the top-right). The voice command list doesn't show because of a 404, but you can find the list in app.config.js (F12 -> Network -> reload page) - scroll to the pile of "show"s. Useless, and horribly flaky, but extremely cool. :D
The SuperVessel lab's free, and there are several resources to rent time on a P8 VM if SuperVessel isn't appropriate.
Also, the video you found is the E8xx product line, which are at the high end of the enterprise / scale-up product line, and (incidentally) different from Mainframes.
Here's some links about the 2U / 2socket boxes if space of each node is important:
Oh, TIL; I had no idea it was actually free. I understood that each user got 500 points and that you use 10/day, which gives you 50 days of usage... aaand then I'm not sure. I'm not dissing it, I just don't understand (and there's zero documentation).
And thanks for the video links! I'll definitely check out the YouTube channel.
PS. I'm getting multiple errors in the dashboard when I try to switch to NewYork1 zone. Where would be a good spot to mention this?
I remember reading about how old IBM mainframes used to have a couple ThinkPads (literally two, for redundancy) bolted just inside the cabinet door, just to change low-level configuration settings. It seems to me that these POWER8 boxen are aimed toward that end of the market.
YouTube's history interface is terrible, but I managed to dig this out - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOzPTopt7HE - which shows the different discrete components in a POWER8 system and how they're put together. I should probably do a bit more research on this, that video is quite basic (and 2 years old now).
POWER8 systems seem to necessarily take up a lot of space, and not does this contributes to the raw material cost, it's also a factor in renting, considering that you can pack a basic but decent punch with 1U or 2U of x86. My guess is that IBM isn't trying to be competitive here, but aim for a specific market. That'll influence the price too.
It's thanks to market factors and the state of education (which sometimes produces wins like these!) that places like PTOpenLab exist, I think (again, this is an [un]educated guess), and I'm super appreciative that they do. I haven't figured out how the "blue points" system works yet though (you get 500, and use 10/day for running a VM); I can at least say that the number doesn't increase each day. I vaguely recall reading something to the effect of creating HDD images for the platform would give you points based on how many other people downloaded them (there's somewhere you can upload to), but I can't find that documentation now.
Another fun tidbit: the dashboard UI is based on SmartAdmin (a premium jQuery plugin, apparently), which comes with Chrome-compatible voice control (note the mic button at the top-right). The voice command list doesn't show because of a 404, but you can find the list in app.config.js (F12 -> Network -> reload page) - scroll to the pile of "show"s. Useless, and horribly flaky, but extremely cool. :D