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Canadian university buys Dell supercomputer

Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec purchases a $7 million, 2,024-processor supercomputing cluster from Dell.

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise Processors, semiconductors, web browsers, quantum computing, supercomputers, AI, 3D printing, drones, computer science, physics, programming, materials science, USB, UWB, Android, digital photography, science. Credentials
  • Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Stephen Shankland

The Universite de Sherbrooke in Quebec has purchased a 2,024-processor supercomputing cluster from Dell for $7 million, the computer maker said Wednesday. The system, which uses Red Hat's version of Linux, is expected to have a peak performance of 13.9 trillion calculations per second, though actual performance is typically considerably lower.

The system uses 872 Dell PowerEdge 750 servers, which are 1.75-inch-tall rack-mounted models with single 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processors, and 576 PowerEdge SC1425 servers, which are the same height but use dual 64-bit Intel Xeon 3.6GHz processors. Extreme Networks and TopSpin supplied networking switches to join the systems into a shared computing resource.