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.
"We didn't fly in engineers or hire specialized technicians. We were able to do it with our own IT staff in about four hours," he said.
