Because I've already got a nice laptop, and several underutilized older servers. I'd like to test on Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, ARM, and Power8. The older Intel processors are easily available, https://www.runabove.com/ gives me access to Power8 (and supposedly ARM, although I haven't tried it yet), but I haven't yet found inexpensive ways to test on Broadwell and Skylake.
For this particular case, I was hoping to just spend a few hours testing some SIMD variants of this: http://cglab.ca/~morin/misc/arraylayout-v2/ The Haswell performance is disappointing, but I think that's because the Haswell AVX2 gather performance is poor but Skylake is supposedly much better. See the link I gave earlier for details.
Does this mean all new projects are rejected, that they're trying to halt new applications, or what?
Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h' (Slackware 14.1, procps 3.2.8, manpage says "Cohesive Systems / 20 Mar 1993").
I'm not sure. I signed up during a Beta window last year, and don't know where they are going with it overall.
Also, I haven't used it in a few months, and when I tried right now I got errors on creating a new instance. I opened a support ticket.
Also, are you the author of the 2nd link? I tried it, my `free' doesn't have `-h'
No, I'm not the author. Searching though, it looks like "-h" is a synonym for "human readable" on some distributions, and just does automatic units.