They Let Me Take Apart a SUPER COMPUTER
Linus gets an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Simon Fraser University’s $82 million supercomputer, packed with 640 Nvidia GPUs, EPYC Genoa CPUs, 1.152 TB RAM nodes, and blisteringly fast HBM3 memory (3.36 TB/s!). The whole system uses a direct-die liquid-cooling loop—featuring Aquatherm tubing, 600 kW cooling distribution units, and massive evaporative towers—to capture up to 95% of the heat it generates.
Beyond raw compute, this beast is tied together with 800 Gbit NDR networking, backed by 49 PB of spinning disks and 2 PB of NVMe flash for data storage (think LHC experiments and AI pipelines). Linus cracks open GPU and 192-core CPU nodes, tours security measures, power delivery, and discovers who actually footed the bill for Canada’s fastest academic data center.
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