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A Cookbook for Making Time-Lapse Videos of Research Computing Installs

Published: 10 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

While computers are ubiquitous in society, the most powerful "supercomputers" still evoke a sense of awe and exclusivity for most of the general public. Research computing centers that manage and operate high performance computing systems frequently have public communications strategies and techniques to help raise awareness of their resources and services within client and stakeholder communities. At the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), one such technique is to publish time-lapse videos of the installation of new computer clusters, which help the public better understand the scale and complexity of OSC’s systems. The author has been responsible for the creation of OSC’s time-lapse videos for many years and has developed a variety of tools and best practices that are documented in this paper, which other research computing centers will be able to utilize for their own videos.

References

[1]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2016. Building a supercomputer: The Owens Cluster. OSC. www.osc.edu/timelapse-2016
[2]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2018. Building a supercomputer: The Pitzer Cluster. OSC. www.osc.edu/timelapse-2018
[3]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2020. OSC Deploys $4.3 Million Supercomputer Expansion. OSC. www.osc.edu/timelapse-2020
[4]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2022. Building a supercomputer: The Ascend Cluster. OSC. www.osc.edu/timelapse-2022
[5]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2022. Ohio Supercomputer Center Virtual Data Center Tour. OSC. www.osc.edu/about/visitOSC
[6]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. crontab. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/crontab
[7]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. daily_check.sh script. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/daily_check.sh
[8]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. daily_email.sh script. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/daily_email.sh
[9]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. daily_video.sh script. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/daily_video.sh
[10]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. final_video.sh script. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/final_video.sh
[11]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. getimg.sh script. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/blob/main/getimg.sh
[12]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. Ohio Supercomputer Center launches GPU cluster “Ascend” for high performance computing work. OSC. www.osc.edu/press/ohio_supercomputer_center_launches_gpu_cluster_ascend_for_high_performance_computing_work
[13]
Ohio Supercomputer Center. 2023. Time Lapse Repo. OSC. www.github.com/OSC/time-lapse/
[14]
Axis Communications. 2023. AXIS M3004-V Network Camera. Axis. www.axis.com/products/axis-m3004-v
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Axis Communications. 2023. AXIS M3058-PLVE Network Camera. Axis. www.axis.com/products/axis-m3058-plve
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curl. 2023. curl. curl. www.curl.se
[17]
FFmpeg. 2023. FFmpeg. FFmpeg. www.ffmpeg.org
[18]
ImageMagick. 2023. ImageMagick. ImageMagick. www.imagemagick.org
[19]
Mutt. 2023. The Mutt E-Mail Client. Mutt. www.mutt.org

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  1. A Cookbook for Making Time-Lapse Videos of Research Computing Installs

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    PEARC '23: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2023: Computing for the Common Good
    July 2023
    519 pages
    ISBN:9781450399852
    DOI:10.1145/3569951
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 10 September 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. marketing
    2. system installation
    3. time-lapse

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