Steele (supercomputer)

Steele is a supercomputer at Purdue University.

The cluster is the second largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten not a part of a national center and was the largest when built. Steele is made up of 893 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and has a theoretical peak performance of more than 60 teraflops. It was number 104 on the November 2008 Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list and 196 in June 2009. Steele and its 7,144 cores replaced the Purdue Lear supercomputer which had 1,024 cores but was substantially slower. Steele is used to design new drugs and materials, to model weather patterns and the effects of global warming, and to engineer future aircraft and nano electronics, among other things. Steele is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization, which also operates the Coates cluster. Steele runs 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. The cluster is primarily networked utilizing a Foundry Networks BigIron RX-16 switch with a Tyco MRJ-21 wiring system delivering 576 non-blocking gigabit connections and eight 10-gigabit uplinks. Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele are made available to the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid 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 and the center of DiaGrid, a nearly 27,000-processor (summer of 2009) Condor-powered distributed computing network for research involving Purdue and partners at other campuses. Steele was built in four hours on May 5, 2008, by a team of 200 Purdue computer technicians and volunteers, including four volunteers from athletic rival Indiana University, and surprised even those working on the project by running 1,400 science and engineering jobs by lunchtime.

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/