Steele User Guide
Overview of Steele
Overview of Steele
Biography of John M. Steele
Overview of John M. Steele
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.
John Campbell, Purdue associate vice president for information technology and head of ITaP Research Computing, stands with John Steele (L) at the dedication of the new Steele cluster in May 2008.
John M. Steele
John M. Steele, associate professor emeritus of computer sciences, was involved with research computing at Purdue almost from its inception. He joined the Purdue staff in 1963 at the Computer Sciences Center associated with the then-new Computer Science Department. He served as the director of the Purdue University Computing Center, the high performance computing unit at Purdue prior to ITaP, from 1988 to 2001 before retiring in 2003.
John Steele signs the end panel of the Steele cluster.
His research interests have been in the areas of computer data communications and computer circuits and systems, including research on an early mobile wireless Internet system. He still does computing consulting. Steele earned his bachelor's in math and physics and master's in electrical engineering at Purdue.