Re: Economics 101
When I was involved with the support of the UK Met. Office's IBM Power 775 systems, and their eventual decommissioning about 5 years ago, there were several weeks where the systems had to be kept operational and fully functional as a backup for their replacement, but no forecasting jobs were being scheduled on the systems.
The system manager gave me carte blanche to run any jobs I wanted.
Unfortunately, being on the support rather than the application side, I did not have anything more than jobs to test various parts of the scheduler, but in theory I could have had significant time on two top 200 (they were still very powerful) and two smaller supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency.
The decommissioning was a wonder to behold. Apart from some initial preparation work scrubbing the volume data storage, all 4 supercomputers were still in an operational state at 08:00 on the Monday, and completely removed from the machine halls and in trucks by about 19:00 on the Thursday evening, with a day's contingency. All that was left was the cooling water pipework and power sockets.
And the decommissioning crew consisted of an IBM Fellow and more Distinguished Engineers than you could shake a stick at plus some field engineers, in total more than half of the engineering team for these systems from the US.
I think they had an incentive to complete the job early, as their flights back to the US were not until the weekend, and they ended up with an extra day doing the tourist thing!