I got my bachelors ME degree at Michigan State and understand what competition means in the Big Ten.  You crush it when you can.  Well, the folks at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing crushed it on Monday. With a huge team effort, they installed their new supercomputer - including unboxing the equipment - in just half a day. C|net called it an "electronic barn-raising." 

The supercomputer, named Steele, features 812 Dell PowerEdge 1950 dual-quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second, placing Steele in the top 40 on the current Top 500 computers list.  Tinkergeek has 249 photos of the install , which is probably some sort of record by itself.  You get to see them working on the raised floor, installing racks, rails, switches HVAC, power and network cabling.  My favorites are #s 79, 90, 152, 179, 200 and the last one - the rack with signatures of the team that worked on it - very cool.  They have a brisk stop action video too.   

The HPCC will be used for research across a variety of disciplines, including engineering, biological, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics and physics. The leading researchers at Purdue pooled their grants and provided a majority of the funding for the cluster, which is housed at Purdue's Mathematics Building on campus.

High-performance computing is helping to support research that benefits society and Purdue is one example of major universities using Dell technology to enhance their teaching, learning and research initiatives.