Question: how big are the physical dimension of the computers you use?

Julian Onions answered on 26 Jun 2020:

They tend to get smaller over time – as fabrication techniques improve, you can fit more and more transistors onto a chip, so technology tends to shrink slowly, up to a point. This is good and bad, because the chips are smaller, the distances the signals have to travel is shorter (so faster) but on the downside, the switching of transistors generates heat, and it is difficult to get the heat out of the chip. If this is not done they melt, and stop working!
Physically though, they need a lot of room for the cooling and power and disk space and so on, so they tend to be on fairly big rooms to allow airflow, and they are very noisy with all the fans blowing cold air over them.
Here is a picture of one I’ve used.
https://www.cscs.ch/computers/piz-daint/