With the help of athletic rival Indiana University, Purdue University installed 1000 computers in a cluster the size of an 18-wheeler in just half a day -- a process that usually takes weeks. This new addition to the Grid, called Steele, was financed by more than two dozen faculty members. One of the users will be the Tier-2 data center at Purdue, which will collect data from the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, soon to open on the Swiss-French border, and make it available to scientists on campus and around the world.
As International Science Grid This Week, reports:
The CMS Tier-2 centers support the computational needs of CMS physicists, both for physics analyses and simulations. It and the other six Tier-2 centers in the U.S. work in concert with the Tier-0 at CERN and the half-dozen international Tier-1 centers, primarily the U.S. Tier-1 at Fermilab. The world-wide Tier structure will manage and distribute the deluge of data expected from the CMS detector when the Large Hadron Collider turns on later this year.
Steele is one of a handful of facilities in the U.S. integrated with the two principal government-funded grid systems for scientific computing, OSG and TeraGrid. It replaces the older Lear cluster at Purdue, parts of which will be reassembled at Purdue’s Calumet and Fort Wayne satellite campuses. Steele has more than six times the processing power of Lear and at maximum speed is expected to reach 60 trillion operations per second.
“We got the new cluster running on the grid within a couple of hours,” says Purdue physics professor Norbert Neumeister. Smith says that it happened quickly for the same reasons the cluster itself came together in a few hours: careful planning and the automation recently built into the clustering and grid install procedures.
Check out the cool movie trailer-style video announcing Installation Day (rated "R FOR RESEARCH. EXTREME UNPACKING AND INSTALLATION.")
