If youāve never seen a supercomputer in the flesh, the name is a little misleading. They donāt look as clean as it sounds. More often theyāre banks and banks of individual units networked together to form a single hivemind, a gigantic mess of cables, stacks and fans.
To give you an appreciation of how much work goes into putting one together, hereās a timelapse video of one being put together at my alma mater, the Australian National University. Its full name is pretty great: the official title is the āFujitsu Primergy cluster high-performance supercomputerā.
Construction of the NCI supercomputer ā timelapse video [YouTube, via RiotACT]
