Steele is a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

that was installed at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

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 Coates may refer to: People *Coates (surname) Places United Kingdom *Coates, Cambridgeshire *Coates, Gloucestershire * Coates, Lancashire * Coates, Nottinghamshire *Coates, West Sussex *Coates by Stow, in Lincolnshire *Coates Castle, a Grade ...

built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen and Carter built in 2011. Steele was the largest campus supercomputer in the

Big Ten The Big Ten Conference (stylized B1G, formerly the Western Conference and the Big Nine Conference, among others) is a collegiate athletic conference in the United States. Founded as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives in 1 ...

outside a national center when built. It ranked 104th on the November 2008

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

Supercomputer Sites list.

Hardware

Steele consisted of 893 64-bit, 8-core

Dell PowerEdge The PowerEdge (PE) line is Dell's server computer product line. PowerEdge machines come configured as tower, rack-mounted, or blade servers. Dell uses a consistent chip-set across servers in the same generation regardless of packaging, allowing ...

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 In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

and SDR

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

to each node. The cluster had a theoretical peak performance of more than 60

teraflops Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

. 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 Foundry Networks, Inc. was a networking hardware vendor selling high-end Ethernet Network switch, switches and router (computing), routers. The company was acquired by Brocade Communications Systems on December 18, 2008. History The compa ...

BigIron RX-16 switch with a Tyco MRJ-21 wiring system delivering over 900 Gigabit Ethernet connections and eight

10 Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet (abbreviated 10GE, 10GbE, or 10 GigE) is a group of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. It was first defined by the IEEE 802.3ae-2002 standard. Unlik ...

uplinks.

Software

Steele nodes ran

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

starting with release 4.0 and used

Portable Batch System Portable Batch System (or simply PBS) is the name of computer software that performs job scheduling. Its primary task is to allocate computational tasks, i.e., batch jobs, among the available computing resources. It is often used in conjunction ...

Professional 10.4.6 (PBSPro 10.4.6) for resource and job management. The cluster also had compilers and scientific programming libraries installed.

Construction

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 Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

. The staff had made a video titled "Installation Day" as a parody of the film ''

Independence Day An independence day is an annual event memorialization, commemorating the anniversary of a nation's independence or Sovereign state, statehood, usually after ceasing to be a group or part of another nation or state, or after the end of a milit ...

''. 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.

Funding

The Steele supercomputer and Purdue's other clusters were part of the Purdue Community Cluster Program, a partnership between ITaP and Purdue faculty. In Purdue's program, a "community" cluster is funded by hardware money from grants, faculty startup packages, institutional funds and other sources. ITaP's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing administers the community clusters and provides user support. Each faculty partner always has ready access to the capacity he or she purchases and potentially to more computing power when the nodes of other partners are idle. Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele are made available to the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

TeraGrid TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

(now the

Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

) system and the

Open Science Grid The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide grid of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates distributed computing for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the consortium is com ...

using Condor software. A portion of Steele also was dedicated directly to TeraGrid use.

Users

Steele users came fields such as aeronautics and astronautics, agriculture, biology, chemistry, computer and information technology, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics, pharmacology, statistics, and electrical, materials and mechanical engineering. The cluster was used to design new drugs and materials, to model weather patterns and the

effects of global warming Effects of climate change are well documented and growing for Earth's natural environment and human societies. Changes to the climate system include an overall warming trend, changes to precipitation patterns, and more extreme weather. As ...

, and to engineer future aircraft and nano electronics. Steele also served the

Compact Muon Solenoid The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range ...

Tier 2 Center at Purdue, one of the particle physics experiments conducted with the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

DiaGrid

Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele were made available to the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid using

Condor Condor is the common name for two species of New World vultures, each in a monotypic genus. The name derives from the Quechua language, Quechua ''kuntur''. They are the largest flying land birds in the Western Hemisphere. One species, the And ...

software. Steele was part of Purdue's distributed computing Condor flock, and the center of

DiaGrid A diagrid (a portmanteau of diagonal grid) is a framework of diagonally intersecting metal, concrete, or wooden beams that is used in the construction of buildings and roofs. It requires less structural steel than a conventional steel fram ...

, a nearly 43,000-processor Condor-powered distributed computing network for research involving Purdue and partners at nine other campuses.

Naming

The Steele cluster is named for John M. Steele, Purdue associate professor emeritus of computer science, who was involved with research computing at Purdue almost from its inception. He joined the Purdue staff in 1963 at the Computer Sciences Center associated with the then-new Computer Science Department. He served as the director of the Purdue University Computing Center, the high-performance computing unit at Purdue prior to the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, from 1988 to 2001 before retiring in 2003. His research interests have been in the areas of computer data communications and computer circuits and systems, including research on an early mobile wireless Internet system.

References

External links

* * {{Cite web , title= Steele , url= http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/userinfo/resources/steele/ , work= ITaP Web site , accessdate= May 27, 2013 X86 supercomputers Purdue University