HPCwire: Purdue to Install Supercomputer in a Single Day

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May 01, 2008

Purdue to Install Supercomputer in a Single Day

by Steve Tally

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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., May 1 -- The largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus will be installed at Purdue in a single-day, electronic "barn-raising."

More than 200 employees will gather May 5 to help build the massive machine, which will be about the size of a semitrailer when installed. It will be the largest Big Ten supercomputer that is not part of a national center.

Purdue's computer is being built in a single day to keep the university's science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime, says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

"Our staff thought we were insane when we challenged them to build such a big computer in a single day," McCartney says. "But now there's real excitement to be a part of this."

To generate interest on campus, the organizers created a spoof movie trailer called "Installation Day," which is a take off of the movie "Independence Day." The video can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzThRN4QJI.

Supercomputers are ranked by their performance in running a complex benchmarking system. The results of the tests are published twice each year at http://www.top500.org. Purdue's new supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list, which was published in Nov. 2007.

The current campus leader in supercomputing in the Big Ten is Indiana University's Big Red, which ranks 42nd in the world. (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' "Abe" cluster, which is based in Urbana, Ill. and operated by the University of Illinois, offers computing resources to researchers across the nation and is the largest supercomputer installed at a Big Ten university.)

The world's largest supercomputer is BlueGene/L, which is located at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory.

The Purdue supercomputer will consist of 812 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second.

A group of more than 25 university scientists and engineers pooled research grant funds to contribute to the purchase of the machine; less than 25 percent of the purchase is funded from the university's IT budget.

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