This is a picture of the Laohu (老虎) (Tiger) cluster in Beijing, which I helped maintain. When it was launched in 2009, it had 85 nodes equipped with two Intel Xeon E5520 CPUs and two Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPU accelerators per node. In its last configuration before it was shut down in Feb. 2020, only 32 nodes remained but they have been upgraded with two Nvidia Tesla K20 GPUs per node. Laohu was “my” first supercomputer, and on it I learned high performance computing (HPC) from both the user and admin perspective, and how it is an essential tool in astrophysics and in science and general.
Beijing was a great place those days to experiment with computing, there was a lot of budget for that. In addition to Laohu, we also built a network of gaming GPU-equipped desktop machines (the Silk Machines), some of them from scratch!