Purdue building 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based supercomputer in one day

10 Gigabit Ethernet network featuring Cisco Nexus gear tying massive new "Coates" supercomputer together

More than 200 Purdue University IT staffers Tuesday are rolling up their sleeves and building a 10,000-core supercomputer that will fill a room and start running jobs by the end of the day if all goes as planned.

The supercomputer, dubbed Coates after a late school official, will be wired entirely with 10Gbps Ethernet connections, using Cisco Nexus switches and Chelsio network gear.

Slideshow: Evolution of Ethernet 

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More than 200 Purdue University IT staffers Tuesday are rolling up their sleeves and building a 10,000-core supercomputer that will fill a room and start running jobs by the end of the day if all goes as planned.

The supercomputer, dubbed Coates after a late school official, will be wired entirely with 10Gbps Ethernet connections, using Cisco Nexus switches and Chelsio network gear.

Slideshow: Evolution of Ethernet 

The supercomputer will be built with 1,280 HP dual quad-core computer nodes based on AMD processors, and boast a peak performance of 90 teraflops for handling heavy duty applications such as weather forecasting.

It will blow away a 6,500-core machine called Steele that a Purdue team built last year.  It's expected to crack the worldwide top 50 supercomputer rankings.  Steele once ranked as high as 105.

Purdue IT staff peers from the University of Michigan, University of Iowa and Michigan State University are also expected to take part in the endeavor.

"Last year we unboxed the components for our Steele supercomputer in the morning and we were doing science in the afternoon," said CIO Gerry McCartney in a statement. A Purdue team got up and running in a day last year.

The IT team this year created a parody video for "Cores" (playing off Pixar's "Cars") to preview the event (see on YouTube ). 

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