>> So then, when you see this picture (and remember, it might only be showing half of the whole setup), do you think "wow, cool, they got to wrangle all of that", or do you think "OMG they had to wrangle all of that"? It's an important distinction to make, and I think someone's gut reaction to this amount of hardware in one place might influence how they approach building new systems.

It's a very good point. Like, I have some stuff that eats up RAM like a, a very hungry thing, so I went online to see if I could buy some old server blade with a couple TB of RAM from ebay. I found a few, refurbished, not in a horrible condition, not prohibitively expensive (I'm not currently funded, as such) and I remember this distinct feeling, like a frisson of excitement at the thought of having access to ~20 times more POWER than I usually have...

... and then I cooled down, didn't buy a server, and instead rented one with "only" 256 GB RAM until I could fix my stuff so that it now runs with up to 8GB on my laptop. Still expensive, but we're getting there.

Morale of the story: don't know. I prefer to find ways to make software go faster than rely on hardware? I get the feeling I'm very alone on this, seeing as everyone's talking about putting nuclear-powered server farms in space and whatnot.