Purdue IT Staff Builds Supercomputer In A Half Day

"Purdue University's IT department dedicated May 5 to assembling Dell PowerEdge servers into a campus supercomputer to replace its existing research unit. It had the new machine assembled from component parts by noon, and at 1 p.m., 500 nodes were churning out results.

"'There were no problems installing the hardware or software. There is no cloud to accompany this silver lining,' said Gerry McCartney, university CIO, who had the idea of a staff-assembled supercomputer. 'The assembly was much faster than we expected. By noon we were doing science,' he said in the Purdue News Service summary of the event..."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• If They Mated: Intel and Cray to Conceive x86 Linux Monster(Apr 30, 2008)
• Kernel Space: Toward Better Direct I/O Scalability(Apr 14, 2008)
• Debian Linux cluster beats supercomputer in tsunami warnings(Mar 13, 2008)
• Boffin Stacks 16 PS3s to Simulate Black Hole Collisions(Mar 05, 2008)