Last year ITaP staff and a small army of volunteers had the Steele supercomputer built by noon. The anticipation was that the new Coates cluster would take longer.

Coates is a larger project and it required installing special network cards. Then, the hardware used to mount and group the individual computers in the refrigerator-sized racks that form the supercomputing cluster turned out to require some adjustment, too.

So Coates was finished by, well, around 11 a.m.

Credit people like Nathan Heck, an ITaP security engineer who installed 66 of the network cards over a couple hours. Dwight McKay, director of systems engineering for ITaP research computing, said based on pre-build testing he figured the installers would be able to do 12 cards an hour.

“Concentration and motivation,” Heck quipped when asked for his secret.

Heck and other motivated workers did everything from unboxing the computers—and sorting all the packaging for recycling—to shuttling them to the basement machine room in the Mathematical Sciences Building, sliding them into the racks and plugging in the cabling to tie them all together into one big machine. ....