Gadgetory

what makes a computer super is it the ability to fly is it laser eyes nah man this is computers we're talking about they're super fast and great for a complex simulation script analysis resource exploration weather forecasting all kinds of amazing stuff but first a bit of history according to the authoritative source on absolutely everything the first computers are earned the super prix fixe was designed by Seymour Cray and released in 1964 it was about ten times faster than all other computers at the time and CDC the company for which Cray worked before leaving to start his own sold a hundred of them at eight million dollars each now early supercomputers well for about thirty years actually I guess relied on designs with just a few powerful specialized processing cores but in order to keep up with the ever increasing demand for more power the approach has shifted starting in the 90s towards many off-the-shelf processing course with modern supercomputers containing even hundreds of thousands of processing cores some of them traditional CPUs and some of them actually GP used which can be very efficient for certain workloads now hold on a second there Linus questioned CPUs and GPUs and these things look just like my gaming rig yes but on a much larger scale the titan supercomputer has over 18,000 16 core Opteron processors and over 18,000 Tesla K 20 X GPUs all right then Linus two more questions how do they power and cool that sucker and can it run Crysis power and cooling are pretty much handled by the system designer on a case-by-case basis but the main theme is with as little waste as possible because a supercomputer can consume as much power as thousands of individual homes and cost millions of dollars a year to operate Titan uses 480 volt electrical power to allow thinner gauge cables saving about a million dollars in copper during construction the IBM aquas our system actually recycles the water cooling fluid that's used to cool the processors to heat buildings and Intel and three I'm showed off in inert fluid submerging concept earlier this year that looks bananas as for crisis very funny but no most supercomputers run Linux based operating systems that are heavily customised to best leverage the architecture of their own exact hardware design and to keep inter system communication as fast as possible for optimal efficiency this is what allows these extravagant designs to work so cohesively to complete a single task and unlock new computing paradigms that were impossible or at least impractical with previous hardware but high-speed light based interconnects between ginormous racks of modules isn't the only way to achieve supercomputer level performance usually measured in flops or floating-point operations per second with the Linpack benchmark if your work can be broken up into small chunks to be crunched as part of a larger project then distributed or grid computing is another option where each processor might be in a laptop or even a phone belonging to an individual that calculates everything and then submits the results back to a central system this is how volunteer projects like folding at home which allows regular Joe schmo's to contribute to protein folding research for Stanford University work and all it costs for each person is a few bucks on their monthly electric bill speaking of your electric bill it's bound to go up if you sign up for Dollar Shave Club comm because instead of going outside and trekking through the snow to get fresh high-quality razors every month your post men can do that crap for you while you sit inside and watch TV play games or generally don't have to leave the house Dollar Shave Club service starts at just a few bucks a month and aside from great razors they've got their one wipe Charlies peppermint scented butt wipes for men or women I guess and dr. Carver's shave butter and aftershave for the best possible hair removal experience head over to dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus to join the club and start shaving time and shaving money guys thanks for watching like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment letting me know if you have suggestions for future fast as possible just like this one and as always don't forget to share the video subscribe and all that good you to be stuff