Purdue University Has the Fastest Campus Supercomputer

The Intel Sandy Bridge architecture has struck again on the supercomputing front, enabling the creation of the “Carter” supercomputer that Purdue University is very proud of indeed.

Intel's Sandy Bridge Xenon E-5 processors may not have been formally launched yet, but they have already been put to work.

The “Carter” supercomputer from Purdue University has just been announced as completed and describes as the fastest campus supercomputer.

Seeing how it ranks 54 on the Top500 list, the boast is very much merited.

It was funded through a cooperative program where faculty members pool research funds and uses HP and Mellanox technologies, not the least of which are HP Proliant servers.

“We need as much computing cabability as we can get to make our forecasts as detailed as possible,” says Michael Baldwin, an assistant professor of atmospheric science.

"In our models, we combine physical processes of the atmosphere with high-resolution data from weather radar and satellites. We can use Carter to create useful forecasts that the public can use and potentially save lives.”

While Baldwin is developing computational techniques meant to predict hazardous US weather, Alan Qi, an assistant professor in computer science, biology and statistics, is using “Carter” for cancer research.

“Currently the massive patient data is examined manually by a technician; this procedure is obviously very slow and prone to errors. Carter allows us to analyze the data by new advanced statistical models and to have more accurate results in a couple of hours,” Qi said.

Carter is a ProLiant server cluster based on the ProLiant SL6500s Scalable System and has 48 server nodes, 1,296 Xeon E5 family processors and a total of 10,368 actual CPU cores.

Also, through the Mellanox FDR InfiniBand network, it can transfer data at 56 gigabits per second.

All in all, compared to the 2008 Steele, Purdue's new HPC installation works three times better for half the power and half the space.