Purdue Plans a 1-Day Supercomputer "Barnraising"

An anonymous reader points out an article which says that "Purdue University says it will only need one day to install the largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus. The so-called 'electronic barn-raising' will take place May 5 and involved more than 200 employees. The computer will be about the size of a semi trailer. Vice President for Information Technology at Purdue Gerry McCartney says it will be built in a single day to keep science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime." Another anonymous reader adds "To generate interest on campus, the organizers created a spoof movie trailer called 'Installation Day.'"

Comments

Thin on details

[NotBornYesterday]

TFA mentioned the Dell 2*quad Xeon hardware, but failed to mention what kind of storage will be attached to it, what kind of network(s) they plan to use to rope it all together, what OS & filesystem they plan to use, & other stuff that would be fun to know.

If they don't tell us what they're using, how can we have flame wars over whose technology really should have been used in it? We'll be stuck with nothing to do but make up bad car analogies.

It would be like, "GM is announcing a barnraising event today to build a new car. Over 200 people will all get together at once to assemble it. It is going to have 8 cylinders and burn gas."

Sheesh.