Supercomputers are pretty amazing. They’re mostly used for research since they specialise in processing, analysing, and doing computations on ridiculous amounts of data at high speeds. Supercomputer simulations have been used to understand earthquakes, model pandemics, predict the weather, and more. Harvard University has its own supercomputing cluster called Odyssey, which boasts a 14,000 core Intel Xeon architecture with over 10 TB of RAM. But unlike most researchers, one student at Harvard decided to use the school’s massive computing power…to mine Dogecoin
Unfortunately for the student (who remains unknown at the moment), mining uses a lot of processor power, and this type of nonstop activity was soon noticed by system administrators. Harvard’s assistant dean for research computing, James Cuff, sent out an email (included at the bottom of this post) acknowledging the misuse and warning others of the consequences of abusing University resources. In short, the student has been permanently banned from using all research computing facilities at Harvard.
Of course, you might be wondering exactly how profitable this was. As it turns out, the Odyssey can only mine at a maximum of ~20MH/s, since any mining operations would be using the CPUs. This is still a lot, but it’s not at all insanely fast. In fact, just 13 AMD 7990 GPUs can get similar results. Harvard’s college newspaper, “The Harvard Crimson,” reported that if mining had continued for days, the student could have generated “hundreds, and perhaps thousands” of dollars in DOGE. It’s unknown exactly how many Dogecoins the student mined, and whether or not he/she kept his/her earnings.