Lifetime Service
- Installed: 05/05/2008
- Retired: 11/30/2013
- Hours: 252,515,401
- Jobs: 32,427,088
- Users: 1,575
- Groups: 117
- Top Groups: NCN, Merkle Group
Overview of Steele
Steele was a compute cluster operated by ITaP and the first system built under Purdue's Community Cluster Program. ITaP installed Steele in May 2008 in an unprecedented single-day installation. It replaced and expanded upon ITaP research resources retired at the same time, including the Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth clusters. Steele consisted of 852 64-bit, 8-core Dell 1950 and 9 64-bit, 8-core Dell 2950 systems with various combinations of 16-32 GB RAM, 160 GB to 2 TB of disk, and 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GigE) and InfiniBand local to each node.
| Sub-Cluster | Number of Nodes | Processors per Node | Cores per Node | Memory per Node | Retired in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B | 180 | Two 2.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel E5410 | 8 | 16 GB | 2013 |
| C | 48 | Two 2.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel E5410 | 8 | 32 GB | 2013 |
| D | 41 | Two 2.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel E5410 | 8 | 32 GB | 2013 |
| E | 9 | Two 3.00 GHz Quad-Core Intel E5450 | 8 | 32 GB | 2013 |
| Z | 48 | Two 2.33 GHz Quad-Core Intel E5410 | 8 | 16 GB | 2013 |
At the time of retirement, Steele nodes ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) and used Moab Workload Manager 7 and TORQUE Resource Manager 4 as the portable batch system (PBS) for resource and job management. Steele also ran jobs for BoilerGrid whenever processor cores in it would otherwise be idle.