For the third year in a row, Purdue University, in Indiana, USA, has confirmed its lead in the rarified realm of supercomputing by unveiling Conte, the nation's fastest university-owned supercomputer – developed in a collaboration with HP, Intel, and Mellanox.
Conte is the highest-ranking campus supercomputer on the June 2013 Top500 list of international supercomputers. It surpasses the nation's previous fastest university-owned machine, Carter, which was built in 2011 and is still in operation at Purdue.
'We don't do this only to be at the top of a list, although it's nice to have an external measure of our success in delivering the most effective computational tools to our researchers,' said Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology. 'The reason we do this is because our faculty have a constantly growing need for more and faster computational resources.'
Conte clocked in with a sustained, measured maximum speed of 943.38 teraflops and a peak performance of 1.342 petaflops. The computer would process a problem 15,000 times faster than a 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro.
The computer was built with 580 HP ProLiant SL250 Generation 8 (Gen8) servers, each incorporating two Intel Xeon processors and two Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, integrated with Mellanox 56Gb/S FDR InfiniBand.
