Purdue's big computer assembled fast

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., May 5 (UPI) -- Staff at Purdue University said Monday they put together the Big Ten school's new supercomputer in super-fast fashion.

The 812-node supercomputer -- the largest independent processor of any school in the conference -- was expected to take a whole day to build but it turned out by 1 p.m. more than 500 nodes were already running 1,400 campus research projects, the school announced in a news release. The work started about 6 a.m.

"The assembly was finished much faster than we expected, and by noon we were doing science," said 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."

Purdue is calling its supercomputer "Steele" after former staff and faculty member John Steele. Its 812 Dell servers can complete 60 trillion operations per second, putting it in the top 40 among the world's most powerful supercomputers.