Coates (supercomputer)

Coates is a supercomputer installed at Purdue University on July 21, 2009. The high-performance computing cluster is operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization. ITaP also operates clusters named Steele built in 2008, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Coates was the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten outside a national center when built. It was the first native 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) cluster to be ranked in the TOP500 and placed 102nd on the June 2010 list.

The Coates cluster consists of 982 64-bit, 8-core HP Proliant DL165 G5p and 11 64-bit, 16-core HP Proliant DL585 G5 systems using AMD 2380 and AMD 8380 processors with various combinations of 16-128 gigabytes of RAM, 500 GB to 2 terabytes of disk and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) local to each node. Coates uses Cisco and Chelsio network equipment. The cluster's nodes are arrayed in five logical sub-clusters each with different memory and storage configurations designed to meet the varying needs of the researchers using Coates.

Coates nodes run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL5.6) and use Portable Batch System Professional 10.4.6 (PBSPro 10.4.6) for resource and job management. The cluster also has compilers and scientific programming libraries installed.

Coates has a heat-exchanging cooling system that recycles the hot water for use on the Purdue campus.

Coates was largely built in less than four hours on July 21, 2009, by a team of more than 200 Purdue computer technicians and volunteers, including volunteers from Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. It was the second such "high-tech barn raising" hosted by Purdue to assemble a cluster in a single morning. The process was first used for the Steele cluster in 2008.

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