Steele (supercomputer)

Steele is a supercomputer at Purdue University. It is the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten that is not a part of a national center. Steele is made up of 812 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops. Steele and its 6,496 cores replaces the university's "Lear" supercomputer which had 1,024 cores. Steele will be used to design new drugs and materials, to model weather patterns and the effects of global warming, and to engineer future aircraft. Steele is running Red Hat enterprise Linux and also has compilers and scientific programming libraries installed. The Steele cluster is managed using cfengine, an open source management tool. Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele will be made available to the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid by using Condor software. Steele is part of Purdue's distributed computing Condor flock, which is the largest publicly disclosed distributed computing system in the world. Steele was built in four hours on May 5, 2008, by a team of 200 Purdue computer technicians and four volunteers from athletic rival Indiana University. The cluster is primarily networked utilizing a Foundry Networks BigIron RX-16 switch utilizing Tyco MRJ-21 wiring system delivering 576 non-blocking gigabit connections and 8 10 gigabit uplinks.

References

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080505/SPORTS0602/80505071

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207601782

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080501McCartneySteeleLocal.html

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207501882

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/05/05/purdues_big_computer_assembled_fast/2999/