Purdue installs the Big Ten's largest campus supercomputer
Purdue University staff members hoped to build the Big Ten’s largest campus supercomputer over the course of a Monday in May 2008. But their estimate was off. They were done by lunch.
"The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science," says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. "The staff was enthusiastic, the weather was great and there were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining."
By 1 p.m. more than 500 of the 812 nodes that make up the supercomputer already were running 1,400 research jobs from across campus.
The supercomputer, named Steele for former staff and faculty member John Steele, is made up of 812 Dell servers and capable of performing 60 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers and is the largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus that is not a part of a national center.
Read more about the Steele cluster installation.
View a video of the installation and a spoof movie trailer for the installation, inspired by "Independence Day."
Browse coverage of the Steele installation by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside INdiana Business and HPCwire.
For more information about high-performance computing at Purdue, browse to the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing Web site.
Last updated: July 10, 2009
"The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science," says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. "The staff was enthusiastic, the weather was great and there were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining."
By 1 p.m. more than 500 of the 812 nodes that make up the supercomputer already were running 1,400 research jobs from across campus.
The supercomputer, named Steele for former staff and faculty member John Steele, is made up of 812 Dell servers and capable of performing 60 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers and is the largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus that is not a part of a national center.
Read more about the Steele cluster installation.
View a video of the installation and a spoof movie trailer for the installation, inspired by "Independence Day."
Browse coverage of the Steele installation by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside INdiana Business and HPCwire.
For more information about high-performance computing at Purdue, browse to the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing Web site.
Last updated: July 10, 2009
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