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qchristoday at 3:16 AM0 repliesview on HN

Not that it's super relevant to this discussion, but I think the largest individual machines operated would probably have to go to high energy particle accelerators like the LHC at CERN or those operated by Fermi Lab.

Billions of dollars in cost, run 24/7 with virtually no downtime during regular operations, in underground tunnels with circumferences in the tens of miles, and all throughout is actively-coordinated super conductors and beam collimation in a high-vacuum tube attached to absurdly complex, ultra-sensitive, massively-scaled instrumentation (not to mention the whole on-site data processing and storage facilities). Certainly open to bring convinced otherwise, but aside from ISS in pure cost, so far it's my understanding that those are the pinnacle of large-scale machines.