Have you no sense of awe?

In here, you *whisper*.

Well, actually you yell, since you can't hear anything over the roar of cooling fans sucking heat away from the over 14 thousand CPUs in one system alone.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be shown around the Ames supercomputing/visualization center. I got to see the Columbia supercomputer, a few other systems, a few petabytes of tape robot, and the really awesome hyperwall.

I also got a chance to take a few pictures of the afore mentioned items, though they really don't capture the full experience. The only thing I couldn't take pictures of were the army's Cray systems (I think an X1 and an XT5) even though they were completely standard off-the-shelf crays. I'll be putting the pictures up on my site as soon as I get things back up and running properly.