Purdue IT Staff Builds Supercomputer In A Half Day

The new machine is estimated to be capable of 60 teraflops per second, which places it as number 40 on today’s Top 500 computer list.

Purdue University’s IT department dedicated May 5 to assembling Dell (Dell) PowerEdge servers into a campus supercomputer to replace its existing research unit. It had the new machine assembled from component parts by noon, and at 1 p.m., 500 nodes were churning out results.

"There were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining," said Gerry McCartney, university CIO, who had the idea of a staff-assembled supercomputer. "The assembly was much faster than we expected. By noon we were doing science," he said in the Purdue News Service summary of the event.

"We didn’t fly in engineers or hire specialized technicians. We were able to do it with our own IT staff in about four hours," he said.

The new machine is estimated to be capable of 60 teraflops per second, or 60 trillion operations, which places the Purdue machine as number 40 on today’s Top 500 computer list. The National Science Foundation estimated that supercomputer, called Steele, is capable of executing 40 teraflops on its supercomputer user’s portal, the TeraGrid User Portal at http//portal.teragrid.org.

By Charles Babcock
InformationWeek

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