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What makes a computer super? Is it the ability to fly? Is it laser eyes?

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Perhaps invulnerability to bolts? Nah, man. This is computers we're talking

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about. They're super fast and great for complex simulations, crypt analysis,

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resource exploration, weather forecasting, and all kinds of amazing

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stuff. But first, a bit of history. According to the authoritative source on

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absolutely everything, the first computer to earn the super prefix was

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designed by Seymour Cray and released in 1964.

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It was about 10 times faster than all other computers at the time. And CDC,

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the company for which Cray worked before leaving to start his own, sold a hundred

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of them at $8 million each. Now early

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supercomputers well for about 30 years actually I guess relied on designs with

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just a few powerful specialized processing cores but in order to keep up

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with the everinccreasing demand for more power the approach has shifted starting

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in the '90s towards many offtheshelf

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processing cores with modern supercomputers containing even hundreds

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of thousands of processing cores some of them traditional CPUs and some of them

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actually GPUs which can be very efficient for certain workloads. Now,

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hold on a second there, Lionus question. CPUs and GPUs in these things, just like

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my gaming rig. Yes, but on a much larger

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scale. The Titan supercomput has over 18,000

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16 coropteron processors and over 18,000

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Tesla K20X GPUs. All right, then Lionus.

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Two more questions. How do they power and cool that sucker? And can it run

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Crisis? Power and cooling are pretty much handled by the system designer on a

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case-byase basis. But the main theme is with as little waste as possible because

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a supercomput can consume as much power as thousands of individual homes and

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cost millions of dollars a year to operate. Titan uses 480 volt electrical

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power to allow thinner gauge cables, saving about a million dollars in copper

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during construction. The IBM Aquazar system actually recycles the water

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cooling fluid that's used to cool the processors to heat buildings. And Intel

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and 3M showed off an inert fluid submersion concept earlier this year

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that looks bananas. As for Crisis, very

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funny, but no. Most supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems that are

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heavily customized to best leverage the architecture of their own exact hardware

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design and to keep intersystem communication as fast as possible for

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optimal efficiency. This is what allows these extravagant designs to work so

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cohesively to complete a single task and unlock new computing paradigms that were

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impossible or at least impractical with previous hardware. But high-speed

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light-based interconnects between ginormous racks of modules isn't the

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only way to achieve supercomputer level performance, usually measured in flops

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or floatingoint operations per second with the limpact benchmark. If your work

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can be broken up into small chunks to be crunched as part of a larger project,

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then distributed or grid computing is another option where each processor

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might be in a laptop or even a phone

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belonging to an individual that calculates everything and then submits

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the results back to a central system. This is how volunteer projects like

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folding at home, which allows regular Joe Schmoes to contribute to protein

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folding research for Stanford University work. And all it costs for each person

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is a few bucks on their monthly electric bill. Speaking of your electric bill,

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and shaving money. Guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked

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it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment letting me know if you have suggestions for future fastest possibles

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just like this one. And as always, don't forget to share the video and subscribe

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and all that good youtuby