Purdue’s Steele supercomputer makes list of world’s most powerful systems

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue’s Steele supercomputing cluster is among the most powerful high-performance computing systems in the world, according to rankings released Tuesday (Nov. 18) at the SuperComputing ‘08 conference in Austin, Texas.

The Top 500 Supercomputer Sites project has been ranking the 500 most powerful known computer systems twice a year since 1993 as a way of detecting and tracking trends in high-performance computing. Steele placed 105th on the latest list. Purdue ranked 319th in November 2007.

Steele ranked first among the Big Ten universities with systems on the list. Indiana’s Big Red cluster was at 148, and Minnesota had two entries that rank 268th and 356th. The Steele cluster is operated by Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, the research and discovery arm of Information Technology at Purdue, the university’s central information technology organization.

Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said Steele’s showing was important not so much for where it puts Purdue on the Top 500 list as for the trend it indicates.

“The ranking of our new supercomputer, Steele, is just another indicator that Purdue is improving its position in the high-performance computing world. Our approach is drawing attention at the conference and of media,” McCartney said. “Of course, we don’t do this to see how high we can score on lists such as the Top 500. We do this to enable our scientists and engineers to stay at the forefront of discovery in crucial areas such as cancer research, global warming and the lack of affordable energy.”

Purdue is determined to continue enhancing the high-performance computing resources it provides for research and economic development purposes across the state, McCartney said.

Many people on the Purdue campus can take some of the credit for Steele’s placement on the list, announced at the premier international gathering for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Steele is a “community cluster,” funded by combining faculty grant and lab start-up funds and money from institutional sources.

Each “owner” gets a share of the computing power in the machine based on investment and the opportunity to tap more when they need from the shares of other users idle at the time.

“We built a top 500 machine by working collaboratively with the faculty,” said John Campbell, the associate vice president for information technology who heads the Rosen Center. “This machine is all about pulling together a diverse set of people, utilizing a variety of funding and sharing resources.”

Resources like Steele are integral to the research of Purdue faculty members who helped pay for the cluster, like Gerhard Klimeck, an electrical and computer engineering professor who models the next two or three generations of nanoscale electronic devices, allowing their properties to be understood long before they’re ever fabricated.

More than 250 staff members and volunteers assembled the cluster in a single Monday morning in May. Some of them even came from Purdue’s diehard in-state athletic rival Indiana, attracted by the idea of a high-tech barn raising to undertake a process that normally takes weeks.

Campbell noted that Steele recently averaged 87 percent owner utilization and more than 98 percent utilization overall.

That’s one reason the Rosen Center already is planning Purdue’s next community cluster, to be built in the spring of 2009. Faculty and campus organizations interested in participating in the new cluster, to be called Coates, can find more information online at http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/userinfo/resources/coates/

Purdue supercomputer unboxed and built by lunchtime

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — 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.

Purdue computer technicians put the finishing touches on Steele, a new supercomputer that is among the largest in the world. Staff members at the university were challenged to build the supercomputer in a day, but finished the job by lunchtime. (Purdue News Service photo/David Umberger)

“The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science,” says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “The staff was enthusiastic, the weather was great, and there were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining.”

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.

A time-lapse video of the supercomputer construction is available via YouTube: Supercomputer assembly at Purdue University

The first shift of workers was scheduled to begin unpacking boxes at 7 a.m., but many employees arrived at 6 a.m., eager to begin working. By 11 a.m. the supercomputer was essentially complete except for a few nodes that were intentionally held back to be installed at the noon dedication.

“We discovered that a build like this leverages the commodity nature of cluster computing, by using standard computing parts,” McCartney said. “By using commodity computer servers to build our supercomputer, we didn’t have to fly in engineers or hire specialized technicians. We were able to do it with our own IT staff in about four hours.”

Indiana University, Purdue’s rival on the athletic fields, surprised the Purdue IT staff by sending a crew of technicians to help build the machine.

Matt Link, director of research technology systems at IU, says he was pleased to be a part of the event.

“We often collaborate with people from Purdue on research proposals by videoconferencing, but we don’t routinely get the opportunity to work together in person,” Link said. “Our meeting today was enjoyable and will serve to strengthen future collaborations between IU and Purdue.”

The supercomputer was funded by Purdue faculty members who contributed research funds instead of purchasing equipment for their own laboratories.

Ashlie Martini, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and one of the faculty who helped fund the project, will use the computer’s power to study friction at the molecular level. She watched the technicians install the nodes in the data center.

“The great thing about this approach is that almost everything was done for us,” Martini said. “This was very efficient. I have nothing but good things to say about today.”

Purdue installs Big Ten’s biggest campus computer in just one day

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — 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.

Read more

Purdue installs Big Ten’s biggest campus computer in just one day

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — 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.

Read more