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

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.