Steele (supercomputer)

Steele is a supercomputer that was installed at Purdue University on May 5, 2008. 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 Coates built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Steele was the largest campus supercomputer in the Big Ten outside a national center when built. It ranked 104th on the November 2008 TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list.

Steele consisted of 893 64-bit, 8-core Dell PowerEdge 1950 and nine 64-bit, 8-core Dell PowerEdge 2950 systems with various combinations of 16-32 gigabytes RAM, 160 GB to 2 terabytes of disk, and Gigabit Ethernet and SDR InfiniBand to each node. The cluster had a theoretical peak performance of more than 60 teraflops. Steele and its 7,216 cores replaced the Purdue Lear cluster supercomputer which had 1,024 cores but was substantially slower. Steele is primarily networked utilizing a Foundry Networks BigIron RX-16 switch with a Tyco MRJ-21 wiring system delivering over 900 Gigabit Ethernet connections and eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks.

Steele nodes ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux starting with release 4.0 and used Portable Batch System Professional 10.4.6 (PBSPro 10.4.6) for resource and job management. The cluster also had compilers and scientific programming libraries installed.

The first 812 nodes of Steele were installed in four hours on May 5, 2008, by a team of 200 Purdue computer technicians and volunteers, including volunteers from in-state athletic rival Indiana University. The staff had made a video titled "Installation Day" as a parody of the film Independence Day. The cluster ran 1,400 science and engineering jobs by lunchtime. In 2010, Steele was moved to an HP Performance Optimized Datacenter, a self-contained, modular, shipping container-style unit installed on campus in order to make room for new clusters in Purdue's main research computing data center.

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