ACM TechNews

Purdue Supercomputer Unboxed and Built by Lunchtime

Purdue University News (05/05/08) Tally, Steve

Purdue University employees came together on May 5 to help build the largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus with the goal of building the computer in just one day, but it only took them until lunch. "The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science," says Purdue chief information officer Gerry McCartney. By 1 p.m., more than 500 of the supercomputer's 812 quad-core nodes were running 1,400 research jobs from around the campus. The supercomputer consists of 812 servers and is capable of performing 60 trillion operations per second, which ranks it in the top 40 of the current ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers. McCartney says the computer leverages the commodity nature of cluster computing by using standard computing parts. "By using commodity computer servers to build our supercomputer, we didn't have to fly in engineers or hire specialized technicians," he says. "We were able to do it with our own IT staff in about four hours." The supercomputer was funded by Purdue faculty members who contributed research funds to the effort instead of purchasing equipment for their own labs.

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080505McCartneyBuild.html

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