High Performance Computing (HPC) - Computerphile 

"This is the high performance computing center". "And what do you use it for?" "Uh, high performance computing."

I feel like in cold countries, every building should have a supercomputer, rent out the processing time, and use it to heat the air.

The computing power in that room is truly remarkable. Several years ago I wrote a program to produce a look up texture that is the falloff of sunlight through an atmosphere, handles causing colors to fall off at just the right amounts depending on view angle, sun intensity and a few parameters fast enough to provide photo realistic sky coloration without actually doing the heavy math that a AAA game would use. I based it upon a guy's work whom ran it through something similar to this but with computing technology of that period. He bragged hard about how it only took a couple minutes to calculate in their data center. I had a better understanding of Direct3D9 HLSL 3.0 performance, further optimized his approach and ran it on a computer that was roughly on par with an Xbox360. It took a couple months to finish producing that lookup texture despite better optimization to hardware that was technically better suited to that form of math. I can only imagine what that system in the video is capable of considering some of our greatest computing enhancements have come in the last several years.

Computerphile, please do an episode on the PBS job scheduler. It would be very interesting.

I have done a lot of my PhD calculations on this Minerva (HPC). Thanks to the University of Nottingham and my sponsor.

I like how the questions are coming from a large empty room

It would be awesome to see a video about the software side of HPC

I want to see ackermann(10,10) on this

Thank you for the video! I like seeing different data center architectures

240TB? Those are rookie numbers. You gotta pump those numbers up.

I'll wager someone is running a Quake II server in there somewhere

I took a tour of a similar facility in my university last year, it was pretty much like this, couldn't hear what anyone was saying, couldn't hear yourself think XD. Ours is pretty cool too because the heat output from all the computers actually gets used to heat two nearby buildings in the winter, to save energy.

The most fun video on Computerphile here

T or GFLOPs? Or other benchmark data from this particular kit?

That scrambler pad is a great idea, the amount of times the uv paint wears off from the 4 digit keys!!

I was thinking, that random keypad to get into the room would be a great feature for smartphones and tablets as it would make it harder to shoulder surf someones password as they would have to be close enough to see what numbers you were actually pressing, not just where they were on the screen.

But can it run Crysis?

are the specks of the computer somewhere online to see? couldn't find them

The fire containment system is fantastic.

9:31 THANK YOU FOR ASKING ABOUT THE TANKS!

The problem I have with HPC clusters like those based on Sun Grid Engine is that they're inconvenient for evaluating the performance of multi-threaded applications.

Is it ironic that they have this incredibly powerful, state-of-the-art computing behemoth, and the the sign for the big red emergency killswitch is a piece of paper stuck to the wall with duct tape?

Any chance of a vid on HTC? I know to most it's the same thing as HPC but it does solve some very different problems and imho is more interesting.

If you want to specialize in high performance computing, know Linux, Assembler, C and C++, and naturally have knowledge of computing systems microarchitecture

Chris must be the happiest man ever on this show! Great video as always.

So interesting. I want to know what model cpu's they are using but I guess those are Linus questions and not computerphile questions.

No "...Beowulf cluster of those..." comments ? Well, I'll resurrect that ancient meme :p

Yay. InfiniBand! I have second hand 20Gbit InfiniBand hardware. The connection is between my home server and my desktop. Grabbing videos from RDMA (avoids CPU bottlenecking the speed) capable NFS share from server is like I had the file on my desktop PC. This is important to me since my home server keeps the backups and has the storage, while my desktop has the power but not so much storage. At the moment the link is working close to 10Gbit/s since the InfiniBand card on my desktop is on too slow PCIe slot. Still it's already enough fast for my use since the transfers don't strain CPUs.

Why don't supercomputers use liquid cooling ? Is it because of posibility of short-circuit ? I suspect it would significantly lower the power drawn by cooling equipment.

I am impressed that the server is in a wind tunnel nice cooling idea^^

I'm looking for dr steve bagley's playlist for cpu essentials if anyone has it please post it. Links to all the videos related to the cpu will also work. Thanks.

Oh man they foiled the movie technique of looking for fingerprints on the keypad!

0:22 I am astonished, upset and mostly disappointed that ma boi didn't mention the electronic structure calculations that probably occupy most of their HPC center's processor time

How many compute nodes does it have?

But what about High Computing Performance?

How many cores, how much RAM does this HPC have?

This is fine stuff.

so how much of the overall power is taken by NSA ? :D

Can it run osrs?

2:46 why PBS instead of slurm? is there really a difference

General Request: Could you do a video on Perlin Noise?

Can we see the client side next? How a process is starting.

i hope this get more interest 👍

I wonder how it will take for this to fit in a microcontroller

Nice computer you got there University of Nottingham! It'd be a shame if some meltdown/spectre were to happen to it....

Does this facility include the main university servers as well??

Do you know if it Is possible to achieve a cluster setup that ultimately has a normal Windows 10 User Experience for one node, But incorporating the processing power of multiple Computers. Say I have 4 Computers that are all relatively similar in performance networked on 1GB LAN and one of those is my computer that I run applications like Adobe - Blender - Fusion360 - AutoCAD Normal workstation applications in an ordinary Windows 10 environment, Is it possible to combine these other unused computers to increase productivity of my workstation? Currently having to move files around , have multiple installs of applications on multiple PC's and using VNC to interface with them, it really is incredibly cumbersome for 2021! I would much prefer a regular desktop experience with added benefit of the combined power instead of wasting all this compute power by having it used inefficiently or not at all. If so could you produce a tutorial, I would think it would become popular video in any case :) Thanks in advance and cheers.

You should use 3-phase electricity, cheaper and more abundant, also the fans should not go 100% all the time but have temperature regulated profiles, so you can efficiently save some power, increase the equipment lifespan and the noise will go down

Cool stuff

"We're going to speak outside after." Continues to shout incoherently in the room the entire vid.

is the vizualisation the scientific term for gaming Lol

Mortal person (not a Computerphile viewer) will never appreciate how much planing, setting up, configuration and maintenance goes into tiny HPC center like this. Let alone huge datacenters with hundreds of racks

A great, big, threatening button, which must never, ever, _ever_ be pressed.

@3:45 70 KW? That's A Lot? HPC Installs with recent nodes can easily pull upwards of 25 KW per RACK, so this Cluster must be pretty tame.

but can it play crysis?

The interviewee is great, but the questions were uninteresting. The only information we got from this video is that this uni has a machine worth 2.5M for researchers and students. Wow.

Start: "Its noisy, lets go outside after a quick show around." End of the video, still inside. Of course, everything is interesting and important enough to discuss while you are inside.

Wow Chris, you look very different to when I worked in your team! Good stuff. But they let you loose near the HPC? Are they mad? All that money spent when we obviously know the answer is 42. 😉

how it sounds in my room.....

What’s the difference between an HPC and a supercomputer?

The laugh ahhhahahaha, crazy cost

“This is the high Performance Computing facility for the University of Nottingham” “What do you use it for” “... high performance computing...”

talks about 40G infinband and shows 1G ethernet switches, not ideal, maybe replace the video on those 5secs ? 7:31

After showing the big machines that go bing, I’m not sure I get the point of standing around yelling about the architecture in a noisy server room, where the dialogue is barely audible.

It seams like any general DataCenter.

I bet he sneaks into work at the weekends and mines cryptocurrency on it. "Hey Chris how did you afford your new McLaren?..." "Errm... Won it in a raffle."

* cyberdyne_systems.exe stopped responding * - "Funny, this never happened before." ... *[GRID EMERGENCY STOP BUTTON]*

I'm surprised it's air conditioned. the air conditioning seems to be using 3.5x the power of the actual compute. Rather than chiling the air why not just use more normal air?

It's very interesting. But after 4 minutes, I couldn't watch it anymore and just started skipping through to see if the noise would get any better. In my opinion, a short introduction to show the hardware would be perfectly fine. But most of the interview should have been conducted in an area where shouting over fans wasn't necessary. In editing you could have superimposed images from the parts of the hardware that were being discussed.

When you ask how much it costs and they start laughing its gotta be cheap right...Right?

do universities like nottingham use idle time to mine cryptocurrencies to help pay for the overhead costs? if not, why not?

Like this =)

I miss the colorful Cray computers

Will it run Manic Minor?

give him a throat mic or something, jeez!

brilliant. comment on how noisy the place is and talk about going outside to ask the questions, then proceed to conduct the whole interview screaming on the inside.

On this episode of computerphile shouting...

Apperently RU-vid notifications brought me here before the first like. I mean, what is even this timespan, sometimes it pops up a few seconds after the video is out. And sometimes it literally only tells me about new video 30 mins later And thats how you write a fancy "first" comment

I thought HPC meant Hydraulic Press Channel

Lucky that blue door opens outwards

I would suggest a trick, based on my experience on big servers farm, to decrease dramatically the cost of electricity during the winter ... just open the window.

The button's not even red. Just the cover is red.

11:15 Ooooooh? what does this button do? :D

Hope someone doesn't swing the door open at the end lol!

big red buttons are getting more and more popular these days

"What do you use it for?" ... Games and stuff

Harrison ford

Way too much of this was in a place where you can barely hear anything.

NSA Servers?

I'm wodering if they do mine cryptocurrency if there were spare GPU blades at a given moment. That would probably make sense. But maybe it just doesn't happen.

How many fps of Skyrim can I get with this?

go check out a mainframe, they're wayyyyyy cooler

Can it run tetris?

Dibs. hehehehe

Mine some cryptocurrency with HPC and take the athletic departments spot as the universities biggest revenue maker.

If you want to HPC today, you just go to Amazon (AWS) or other big cloud provider.

भू

but can it game? Where's your 3D Mark score HUH?!

Ha. Dell servers in HP racks

Can I use it to mine bitcoin? :-)