SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010 - THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE  

At Purdue, the demand for computational power needed for research rapidly outpaced the budget for new servers and the space to run them. At the same time, most machines across campus were used less than half of the time. The challenge was to harness these unused computational cycles for multiple colleges while building a framework that maintained scalability and ease of use. Purdue collaborated with Cycle Computing to build DiaGrid, a grid of idle campus computers/servers to provide computational capacity to researchers. DiaGrid’s motto became “No Cycle Left Behind.” By partnering with other campuses across Indiana, Purdue increased its total capacity to more than 177 teraflops, which is equal to a $3 million supercomputer requiring several thousand square feet of data center space. Today, with 28,000 processors, DiaGrid offers two million computing hours per month. Also, the research clusters within DiaGrid average about one percent to two percent at idle, providing one of the highest utilization levels ever. This session will discuss the journey that brought Purdue and Cycle Computing together to form DiaGrid.