Time lapse video: How to build a Fujitsu Primergy supercomputer

This amazing time lapse video shows how to build a supercomputer. Well, don't expect you'd be able to build one after seeing the video. But it is fun to watch all the same.

The video was uploaded to YouTube on December 12, 2012 under the username NCI National Facility. It shows the construction of the Fujitsu Primergy cluster high-performance supercomputer at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at The Australian National University. As Kotaku comments, building a supercomputer is such a complex process that it gets messy: "More often they're banks and banks of individual units networked together to form a single hivemind, a gigantic mess of cables, stacks and fans." According to NCI, the machine has: 57,000 cores = 15,000 home PC's

160 terabytes of RAM = 40,000 home PC's

10 petabytes of hard disc = 10,000 PC hard drives

1,200 teraflops of peak computational performance = 5 months worth of calculations by 1 billion people armed with calculators, in just 1 second.

9 terabyes of network = 9 million home internet bandwidth connections Wow! The NCI boasts that its machine is the #24 on the world's list of Top500 best supercomputers. The machine is constructed based on technology developed for the "K" computer in Japan, until recently the world's fastest computer. According to NCI, its advanced computing infrastructure is funded through programs of the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education. Its operations are sustained by a number of partner organisations including ANU, CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, and a group of Australia's research-intensive universities, and the Australian Research Council. Well... er... happy viewing.