Beginning in the spring semester, seniors and some graduate students at Purdue will learn how to build their own supercomputer.
This comes as part of a new specialization from Purdue’s Department of Computer and Information Technology, which aims to prepare students to meet the demand for hyper-advanced computers in business and industry.
“The knowledge is difficult to obtain on their own,” Thomas Hacker, assistant professor in the department, says. He says that the necessary parts can be too expensive for students to afford. The course, geared toward seniors, will provide an entry point for students to learn and excel in the field.
Students enrolled in the spring course will piece together a high-performance machine using four standard desktop computers linked together. Hacker says they will benchmark the final product against an IBM Bladecenter system to test which machine yields a better performance.—Hurley Goodall
