A Farewell to Moe

In Memoriam: Moe, Beloved Compute Cluster

It is with a mix of sadness and gratitude that we announce the decommissioning of Moe, our steadfast compute cluster, which served the research community faithfully for over a decade (doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.87). Born from cutting-edge technology of its time, Moe was the backbone of countless discoveries and innovations. Since at least 2015, Moe was instrumental in providing data to support public OSoMe tools, like the Networks and Trends tools, and over four dozen publications and dissertations (many of which can be found on our publications page).

By managing a historic archive of over 160 billion public tweets, Moe helped to bridge the gap between raw data and meaningful insights. The cluster's tireless hard disks spun day and night, grinding away to process and store this massive amount of social media data. Moe's contributions will leave a lasting impact on the field, even as its hardware is laid to rest.

Throughout its years of service, Moe inspired admiration and respect from everyone who worked with it.

Moe has been a journey 🙂 even though it was old and small, it served the job somehow 🥰

~ Chathuri Peli Kankanamalge, Former Moe Systems Developer

I was getting all worked up and nervous to ask Fil for $10k to build a new database server for Truthy. I was fairly junior at the time so it was a big ask! I finally gathered all my courage and went into Fil's office, and blurted out "Fil, I think we need $10k to build a new database server for Truthy." He took a few beats to finish writing whatever he was working on, looked up, and replied "What would you do with a million?" He told me to come up with the biggest, baddest Truthy server I could imagine, then double it. It took me a while to even figure out what that would look like but I did, and then I doubled it, and we submitted that as part of a grant. The granting agency came back and said they'd give us half of what we requested, and that's how Moe got built almost exactly as I'd designed it.

~ Clayton A. Davis, Data Scientist, Former OSoMe PhD student

I think you're taking this too seriously.

~ James McCombs, Research Software Developer, Indiana University Research Technology

I remember the first time we ran a job on Moe and it completed in like an hour when previously with the JSON files things would run for days... and of course the Moe's Tavern interface that Clayton put together. I remember the crazy long cron jobs scripts used to upload the new data into IndexedHBase and the errors when the network would have hiccups and crash the rsync transfer, and re-running those manually in a tmux session. I definitely learned a lot working on Moe and I am still amazed we managed to get so much out of it. Farewell Moe, may your parts go back into reuse somewhere, sometime.

~ Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland

Moe has caused me nothing but grief since I've been here.  But I'm still here, so I guess that's something.

~ Ben Serrette, Former Web Developer, Current OSoMe IT Director

In loving memory of our trusty Moe, which bravely stored and processed an endless stream of tweets, memes, and hashtags. You handled more drama than a reality TV show and more disinformation than the KGB archives. Managing your software was a nightmare that kept us up at night, but your legacy of digital gossip will never be forgotten. Rest in peace, dear Moe.

~ Fil Menczer, Luddy Distinguished Professor, Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

Though its drives are now silent, Moe’s spirit lives on in the work it made possible and in its successor, Barney. After years of hard work, built on lessons learned from Moe's journey, Barney promises to carry forward its legacy, ensuring that the insights and innovations Moe helped create will continue to thrive.

Farewell, Moe—your memory will endure in the annals of social media research history.

* Image created using DALL-E and ChatGPT