Purdue University has installed a campus supercomputer, named Carter, using the latest technologies from Intel, HP and Mellanox, including the Xeon E-5 Sandy Bridge Intel processors and HP Proliant servers.
The supercomputer was funded through a cooperative programme in which faculty members pool research funds to purchase computing resources. Carter is the fastest supercomputer installed at a college campus that is not a part of a national centre and is for campus use.
'This groundbreaking supercomputer shows what is possible when researchers, campus IT staff and corporate partners work together as a close team,' said Gerry McCartney, chief information officer, vice president for information technology at Purdue and the Olga Oesterle England Professor of Information Technology. 'Carter is the fastest research computer at any institution that was completely paid for with faculty and university funds. It was built because Purdue, Intel, HP and Mellanox shared a vision to create a new resource for scientific discovery.'
Carter was built with a high-performance HP ProLiant server cluster based on the HP ProLiant SL6500s Scalable System with 648 server nodes featuring 1,296 future Intel Xeon E5 family processors totalling 10,368 cores. With these processors, Carter's servers can increase application performance up to 70 per cent compared to the current generation.
