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Most Popular Supercomputing Videos

Supercomputing is all about big and fast machines with lots of power to perform - whether scientific calculations or code breaking. Below is a round-up of the most popular YouTube videos on supercomputing, including two which feature the world's greatest concentration of supercomputing power and a Mac system that at one time was the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. Enjoy this video look into the world of supercomputing.

Supercomputer - World's Fastest Water-cooled Computer
Views: 268,000 -plus

This most-popular supercomputing video is an excerpt from a 2001 Discovery Channel documentary that provides an unprecedented look at one of the world's greatest concentrations of supercomputers in a specially designed facility at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The supercomputers are on the second floor of the two story building, while the first floor is dedicated to massive water cooling units. There, 8,000 tons of water chill flourinert, a liquid cooling agent used to bring down the temperature of electronic components. The agency's cryptologists rely on these computers' power and speed to make and break codes. One of the most powerful supercomputers is nicknamed "The Thinking Machine." This video runs 1:36.

Apple G5 Supercomputer at Virginia Tech
Views: 263,000-plus

This video shows the 1,100 Apple G5 computers that were connected together at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech to make a supercomputer. This first-ever effort resulted in actual achieved performance of 10.28 Teraflops, making this super computer the third-fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2003 Top 500 rankings. The price tag was $5.2 million, substantially less than custom-built super computers in the top ten. See Apple's web site for more information on this system. This video, produced in 2003, has a run time of 3:18.

Tesla Personal Supercomputer
Views: 145,000-plus

For scientists and engineers who use super computing in their work, the Tesla Personal Supercomputer was created to bring cluster level computing performance - up to 250 times faster than standard PCs and workstations - to the user's desktop. The NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer is based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores. This video was shot at a 2008 super computing show and runs 1:54.

Cray Upgrades "Kraken" Supercomputer with Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors
Views: 112,000-plus

Cray, Inc. employee demonstrates the steps involved in the upgrade process of the "Kraken" supercomputer from Quad-Core AMD Opteron to Six-Core AMD Opteron. About 4 minutes.

For additional video, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.