For some reason, I found myself at Wikipedia, wondering if a techie mentioned at Google was someone I had worked with while I was at Intel Supercomputers in Beaverton, OR. From there, I looked up the Intel Paragon (the class of machine when I joined Intel in 1992).

Then I decided to look-up the Big TFlop Momma that shipped as Intel Supercomputers winded down into obscurity: ASCI Red - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. ASCI Red showed that you could build a supercomputer with off the shelf tech- no excuse me - off the shelf *Intel* technology.

Decommissioned in 2006? Oh, let's take our hats off and lower our head in remembrance.

For some other reason, I remember my business trip to Sandia quite often. Great local food that was super-spicy-hot by default. Rather dingy labs holding the latest in technology. Extreme paranoia about every visitor having a watchful escort present at all times. That made bathroom runs uncomfortable.

So, XIPD (my graphical debugger front-end for parallel applications) runs no more. I hope it helped people find and fix their bugs. That's the hard thing about software development. Your craft produces works that have a short life-time and then disappear. Reminds me of something Roy Batty said about moments lost in time.