I remember when I was a college student at UIC and I took a class that taught me how to use Maple (now they use Sage). The professor also taught supercomputing and he bought some specialized NUMA computers and a few dense multiprocessor systems. If you don't have a large company that will support what you buy then there is a huge risk if the company folds and then your hardware becomes useless to the point that you will let an Undergraduate try to figure out how to fix it (that undergraduate was me). Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful.