One aspect which has dominated FAH for a decade is the continual push for new scientific approaches. This manifests itself in terms of new scientific cores. For example, the new GPU core (Core17) has brought huge speed improvements (especially to AMD GPUs) and involved a complete rewrite.
A negative consequence of this continuous push for improvement and progress is that newer cores often are restricted to more advanced hardware. To help utilize as much power as is available to FAH, we tend to continue projects with older cores, but eventually, the science they can do becomes too limiting, and we must retire them.
This is the eventual fate for all cores, but is most certainly an issue sooner for certain cores, especially cores11 and 78. While we don't have any specific end dates for either, we'd like to remind donors that those cores are reaching "end of life" status, and when they are retired, certain older hardware (eg CPUs that don't support SSE2 or older GPUs) won't be supported by FAH.
The bottom line is that we're working to delay that as long as possible, but this post is a heads up that our support of those cores won't last a lot longer. If I had to guess, I'd say probably within a year or so they would be retired, maybe 2 years if the existing projects need additional data.
As always, we'll give donors more information as we know it and try to give a more specific end date when we know it.
