Steele (supercomputer)

Last updated

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.

Supercomputer Extremely powerful computer for its era

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build even faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.

Purdue University Public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States

Purdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money to establish a college of science, technology, and agriculture in his name. The first classes were held on September 16, 1874, with six instructors and 39 students.

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.

Contents

Hardware

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.

Dell PowerEdge line of server computers

The Dell PowerEdge (PE) line is Dell's server computer product line.

Gigabit Ethernet standard for Ethernet networking at a data rate of 1 gigabit per second

In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet is the various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second, as defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use beginning in 1999, gradually supplanting Fast Ethernet in wired local networks, as a result of being considerably faster. The cables and equipment are very similar to previous standards and have been very common and economical since 2010.

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 as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems.

Software

Steele nodes ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux starting with release 4.0 [1] 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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. 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. All of Red Hat's official support and training, together with the Red Hat Certification Program, focuses on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is often abbreviated to RHEL.

Portable Batch System 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 with UNIX cluster environments.

Construction

The first 812 nodes of Steele were installed in four hours on May 5, 2008, [2] 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 . [3] The cluster ran 1,400 science and engineering jobs by lunchtime. [4] [5] 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. [6] [7] [8] [9]

<i>Independence Day</i> (1996 film) 1996 US science fiction film directed by Roland Emmerich.

Independence Day is a 1996 American science fiction action film directed and co-written by Roland Emmerich. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Randy Quaid, Robert Loggia, James Rebhorn, Harvey Fierstein, Vivica A. Fox and Harry Connick Jr. The film focuses on disparate groups of people who converge in the Nevada desert in the aftermath of a worldwide attack by an extraterrestrial race of unknown origin. With the other people of the world, they launch an all-out counterattack on July 4th—Independence Day in the United States.

HP Performance Optimized Datacenter portable data center manufactured and marketed by HP, built into a standard shipping container

The HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) is a range of three modular data centers manufactured by HP.

Modular data center

A modular data center system is a portable method of deploying data center capacity. A modular data center can be placed anywhere data capacity is needed.

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's TeraGrid (now the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) system and the Open Science Grid using Condor software. A portion of Steele also was dedicated directly to TeraGrid use.

Grants are non-repayable funds or products disbursed or given by one party, often a government department, corporation, foundation or trust, to a recipient, often a nonprofit entity, educational institution, business or an individual. In order to receive a grant, some form of "Grant Writing" often referred to as either a proposal or an application is required.

National Science Foundation United States government agency

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about US$7.8 billion, the NSF funds approximately 24% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.

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.

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, and to engineer future aircraft and nano electronics. Steele also served the Compact Muon Solenoid Tier 2 Center at Purdue, one of the particle physics experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider.

Effects of global warming Describes the effects created by global warming

The effects of global warming are the environmental and social changes caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. There is a broad scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, and that human activities are the primary driver. Many impacts of climate change have already been observed, including extreme weather events, glacier retreat, changes in the timing of seasonal events, changes in agricultural productivity, sea level rise, and declines in Arctic sea ice extent.

Compact Muon Solenoid One of the two main purposes experiment at the CERNs Large Hadron Collider

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 CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter.

Large Hadron Collider particle collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the largest machine in the world. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

DiaGrid

Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele were made available to the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid using Condor software. Steele was part of Purdue's distributed computing Condor flock, and the center of DiaGrid, 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. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

IBM Blue Gene Series of supercomputers by IBM

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

Quadrics

Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produced hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world were based on Quadrics' interconnect. They officially closed on June 29, 2009.

Rocks Cluster Distribution is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in 2000 and was initially funded in part by an NSF grant (2000–07) but was funded by the follow-up NSF grant through 2011. Rocks was initially based on the Red Hat Linux distribution, however modern versions of Rocks were based on CentOS, with a modified Anaconda installer that simplifies mass installation onto many computers. Rocks includes many tools which are not part of CentOS but are integral components that make a group of computers into a cluster.

National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center supercomputer facility operated by the US Department of Energy in Berkeley, California

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, is a high performance computing (supercomputer) user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 7,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Cori, which was ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers in November 2016. NERSC is located on the main Berkeley Lab campus in Berkeley, California.

PlayStation 3 cluster Supercomputer made out of multiple PlayStation 3 consoles

The considerable computing capability of the PlayStation 3's Cell microprocessors has raised interest in using multiple, networked PS3s for various tasks that require affordable high-performance computing.

FinisTerrae organization

Finisterrae was the 100th supercomputer in Top500 ranking in November 2007. Running at 12.97 teraFLOPS, it would rank at position 258 on the list as of June 2008. It is also the third most powerful supercomputer in Spain. It is located in Galicia.

DiaGrid is a large, multicampus distributed research computing network utilizing the HTCondor system and centered at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2012, it included nearly 43,000 processors representing 301 teraflops of computing power. DiaGrid received a Campus Technology Innovators Award from Campus Technology magazine and an IDG InfoWorld 100 Award in 2009 and was employed at the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., to capture nearly 150 days of compute time for science jobs.

Clarence Leroy “Ben” Coates was an American computer scientist and engineer known for his work on waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators.

QPACE is a massively parallel and scalable supercomputer designed for applications in lattice quantum chromodynamics.

System G is a cluster supercomputer at Virginia Tech consisting of 324 Apple Mac Pro computers with a total of 2592 processing cores. It was finished in November 2008 and ranked 279 in that month's edition of TOP500, running at 16.78 teraflops and peaking at 22.94 teraflops. It now runs at a "sustained (Linpack) performance of 22.8 TFlops". It transmits data between nodes over Gigabit Ethernet and 40Gbit/s Infiniband.

University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute

The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in Minneapolis, Minnesota is a core research facility of the University of Minnesota that provides hardware and software resources, as well as technical user support, to faculty and researchers at the University and at other institutions of higher education in Minnesota. MSI is located in Walter Library, on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

Supercomputing in Japan

Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011.

Supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

Carter is a supercomputer installed at Purdue University in the fall of 2011 in a partnership with Intel. 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, Coates built in 2009, Rossmann built in 2010, and Hansen built in the summer of 2011. Carter was the fastest campus supercomputer in the U.S. outside a national center when built. It was one of the first clusters to employ Intel's second generation Xenon E-5 "Sandy Bridge" processor and ranked 54th on the November 2011 TOP500 list, making it Purdue's first Top 100-ranked research computing system.

Rossmann is a supercomputer at Purdue University that went into production Sept. 1, 2010. 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, Coates built in 2009, Hansen built in the summer of 2011 and Carter built in the fall of 2012 in partnership with Intel. Rossmann ranked 126 on the November 2010 TOP500 list.

Supercomputing in Pakistan

The high performance supercomputing program started in mid-to-late 1980s in Pakistan. Supercomputing is a recent area of Computer science in which Pakistan has made progress, driven in part by the growth of the information technology age in the country. Developing on the ingenious supercomputer program started in 1980s when the deployment of the Cray supercomputers was initially denied.

ScREC is a supercomputer developed by the Research Centre for Modeling and Simulation (RCMS) at the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan (NUST) in Islamabad, Pakistan. With a 132 teraflops performance, it is currently the fastest supercomputer in Pakistan.

References

  1. ↑ Charles Babcock (May 12, 2008). "Purdue IT Staff Builds Supercomputer In A Half Day". Information Week. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Odd News: Purdue's big computer assembled fast". United Press International. May 5, 2008. Archived from the original on May 24, 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Purdue to install Big Ten's biggest campus computer in just a day". News release. Purdue University. May 1, 2008. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  4. ↑ Nicolas Mokhoff (May 5, 2008). "What's for lunch? Purdue supercomputer ready by noon". EE Times. Retrieved May 24, 2011.
  5. ↑ Meranda Watling (May 5, 2008). "Purdue supercomputer Big Ten's biggest". Indianapolis Star. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  6. ↑ Timothy Prickett Morgan (July 28, 2010). "Purdue puts HPC cluster in HP PODs: Boilermakers of a different kind". The Register. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  7. ↑ "Purdue University Increases Research Capabilities with HP Performance-optimized Data Center". News release. HP corporation. July 28, 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  8. ↑ Dian Schaffhauser (August 3, 2010). "Purdue U Goes Modular with HP Data Center". Campus Technology. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Purdue moves supercomputer to cutting-edge portable data center -with the computer running". News release. Purdue University. August 31, 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
  10. ↑ "John Steele". Web site bio. Purdue University. Retrieved May 27, 2013.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.