That's not quite 100% true, though it's a pretty accurate statement.Kamicrit wrote:One little detail I love to spit out when talking about #7 is . Not only is F@H 3x more powerful than any super computer, but it is the only super computer that is self upgrading. You never hear about Stanford buying new IBM racks with every new Intel processor.
You never hear much about it, but servers do need to be upgraded. Stanford does upgrade their servers every few years, though like you say, it's not a big deal. Fortunately it's handled smoothly and efficiently with very little publicity.
As the number of clients increases, they have to increase the number of servers. The total amount of RAID storage may be a big number but it gets bigger every year. The ability of an individual server to maintain adequate responsiveness when dealing with a large number of simultaneous connections does degrade as the number of connections increases, demanding more powerful servers as well as more servers. It's almost insignificant compared to the self-upgrading process that you're talking about, but it does happen.
The software is also improved periodically, both by adding new features to the client software that you install on your computer and by adding new features to the code that runs on the servers. Such upgrades can be pretty tricky, of course, since they have to happen to a real-time system that keeps running. Upgraded server code has to work with a variety of client versions and upgraded client code has to work with a variety of server versions with minimal disruption to everyone. (The only time FAH has actually gone down is when there has been a massive power failure at Stanford, but even that isn't 100% because servers are located in a variety of places on campus and more and more places around the world as time goes on. Redundancy continues to improve on a regular basis.)
I'm not suggesting that you need to cover any of this in your presentation, but it's factual background material that you should know in case you're asked. The actual details are not particularly important to your audience, but you also don't want to tell them something that isn't accurate.