Staff members at Purdue University had hoped to build the Big Ten’s largest campus supercomputer in just a day on Monday, May 5. But it didn’t take that long — they were done by lunch. By 1 p.m. more than 500 of the 812 nodes that make up the supercomputer were already running 1,400 research jobs from across campus. The supercomputer, which is named “Steele” for John Steele, former staff and faculty member, is made up of 812 Dell servers and is 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.
Purdue Supercomputer Unboxed and Built by Lunchtime
May 5, 2008