PUCC Timeline

The following provides a historical timeline of computing at Purdue University. Some early history was gathered from The Origins of Computing and Computer Science at Purdue University by Saul Rosen and John R. Rice, A Century and Beyond: The History of Purdue University by Robert W. Topping, an Interview with Duane Pyle on the early history of Computer Sciences at Purdue University, and from Defining a Discipline: The early history of Computer Science at Purdue University, Studies in Computer Science by John Rice and Richard DeMillo. More recent information is taken from my own personal notes and research. 

The timeline is intended to document the events and history of the Purdue University Computing Center, from its formation in the early days to its successors in the present day. 

Early Computing Years

1947 - Prof. Carl Kossack joins the Mathematics Department at Purdue, focused on statistical analysis. In 1948, Prof. Kossack was named the director of the statistical and computing laboratory. He was then named head of Purdue's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, a position he held until leaving for IBM in 1959. 

1952 - Alan Perlis joins the Purdue faculty as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics, hired by Prof. Carl Kossack. Holding a PhD from MIT, Perlis was one of the developers of the Algorithmic Programming (ALGOL) language. and participated in Project Whirlwind, one of the first computers developed for the US Navy. His many accomplishments, including stories from his tenure at Purdue, are documented in his IEEE obituary. 

1952 (October) – An IBM Card Program Calculator (CPC) system is installed and used on campus, located in one of the temporary buildings (Chippewa Building?). This system is used for statistical analysis, and later moved to ENAD.

1953 (February) - Two floors of the former services and stores building, renamed to the Engineering Administration building (ENAD), is remodeled and the IBM equipment previously housed in the Chippewa and Bio Annex buildings is moved to the newly remodeled space. 

1954 (October) – An ElectroData Datatron 203 (or 204) from Consolidated Engineering Corporation in Pasadena is installed in the Statistical Laboratory at a cost of approximately $125,000 (a $25K discount). It is installed in the Engineering Administration (ENAD) building. Professor Alan Perlis was the primary promoter of acquiring the Datatron system, including the $125,000 funding request to President Hovde. Burroughs would later purchase ElectroData in 1956. Sibyl Martha Rock, a female pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing, working at Consolidated Engineering at that time, was personally involved in the sale. The Datatron was chosen over an IBM 650. Duane Pyle was a graduate student under Professor Perlis at this time. (Note: See the ElectroData/Burroughs Datatron 205 Emulator page to try it out.)

1955 - Under Professor Perlis, the design and implementtion of the Purdue Compiler was completed, one of the first algebraic language compilers for the Datatron 204, along with students Joe Smith and Tom Cheatham, who later became a professor in computer science at Harvard University. 

1955 (December) - The Datatron 204 is first used to schedule two selected groups of students, 209 students from the School of Agriculture and 1,600 students from the School of Engineering. This effort is led by James Blakesley from the Schedules and Space Department based on initial planning in 1955. Purdue would continue to lead in the use of online scheduling for its students. 

1956 – Professor Perlis leaves Purdue for Carnegie University.

1958 - The Statistical Laboratory was renamed the Statistical and Computing Laboratory. Duane Pyle becomes acting head of the Computational Division. 

1958 (November) – A Univac Solid State 80 Computer and associated Remington Rand punch card equipment is installed in ENAD, and used primarily for room scheduling on campus. The installation did not come without controversy. Many, including Dr. Rosen, viewed the Univac as the same class as the Datatron, and not an advancement in the next generation of computing for a major university. These concerns precipitated additional discussion and committee work surrounding the increasing use of computing across several disciplines on campus. 

1959 – Professor Kossack makes a recommendation to President Hovde to establish a separate School of Mathematics from the Science, Education, and Humanities Department, and include computing sciences into the curricula. A recommendation is made by Harold DeGroff, Dean of Aeronautical Engineering, to create a committee to explore the creation of a computer research center on campus. 

1960 - Dr. Duane Pyle receives his PhD in Mathematics and is named head of the Computational Division. Dr. Richard Kenyon is named assistant head. 

1961 – Stanley Reiter, Professor of Industrial Management and committee member, outlined a committee findings in a “Proposal of Ad Hoc Committee on Computers” to President Hovde. The recommendation is to establish a "Computer Sciences Center" to conduct both research computing and computer science education. Members of the committee includes Dr. Duane Pyle. Establishment of the Computer Sciences Center becomes the forerunner of the Purdue University Computing Center.

1961 – The Mathematics department is moved to the School of Engineering, and renamed the Division of Mathematical Sciences. 

1961 (Spring) – A recommendation is made by Virgil Anderson, Director of the Statistical and Computing Lab, proposing the following named departments: Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Sciences, and Mathematics Education.

1961 - Magnetic tapes loaded with computer programs are transferred by car to offsite computer locations, including Allison Motors in Indianapolis and the University of Chicago, to be run on their computing systems due to lack of available compute time.

1962 – An IBM 7094 is installed in the Engineering Administration Building and leased at a cost of $30,000 a month. At the September 1965 Board of Trustees meeting, a 7094 was purchased outright for $506,473 from IBM. 

1962 (July 1) – The Datatron is retired from service. At that time, the nameplate from the 203 (serial number 103) was in the possession of Duane Pyle. On the same day, Dr. Samuel Conte began a position as the Director of the Computer Sciences Center.

1962 (Summer) - Dr. Samuel Conte hires Dr. Saul Rosen and Dr. Duane Pyle as faculty members of the newly formed Computer Science department. Both Pyle and Rosen would have a significant impact in the development of the computer science discipline at Purdue, and with the development and operation of the computing facilities. Dr. Richard Kenyon and Dr. Robert Korfhage were also professors of the newly formed department. 

1962 (October 24) – The Purdue Board of Trustees approves the new Department of Computer Science - the first computer science academic program in the United States with an initial class of 24 masters and doctoral students. The Computer Sciences Center moves to the Division of Mathematical Sciences. Part of Dr. Kossacks lab had been split off to form the Computer Sciences Center, the forerunner to PUCC.  

1963 (April) – An IBM 7090 and an IBM 1401 are installed in the Purdue Computer Sciences Center in the Engineering Administration building, funded by  a 3-year $500,000 grant from the NSF. The 7090 was upgraded to a 7094 at a later date. The 1401 helped to eliminate the need to transport compute jobs to Allison and the University of Chicago. Popular computer languages used on the 7090 include Fortran II, Fortran IV, COBOL, MAD, FAP, and IBMAP, with 300-400 compute jobs run each day. 

1964 - Due to the split computing time of the IBM 7090 between the High Energy Physics group during daytime hours and other research computing projects, the High Energy Physics department purchased an IBM 7044 and moved out of the Computer Sciences Center. 

1964 – It is believed that the Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6400 was installed this year. The 6400 was essentially a 6500 without the functional units. 

1967 (Fall) – Saul Rosen returns to Purdue from The State University of New York as a faculty member in the Computer Science department. Professor Rosen remained a faculty member until his death in 1991.  One of his early contributions was a a joint project between the Computer Science Center and the Computer Sciences Department was the development of PUFFT (Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator), streamlining the ability to compile and run Fortan programs on the IBM 7094, and improving the throughput for students and research jobs. 

1967 (August) - A Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6500 supercomputer was also installed this year, adding to an existing CDC 6400. The 6500 contained two 6400 processors sharing main memory, at a purchase price of $3 million. The purchase was partially funded by an NSF grant of $1.2 million as announced by Prof. Samuel Conte and head of the Computer Science department, and the largest grant ever awarded to a university. 

1967 - Maurice Howard Halstead joins Purdue as a faculty member in the Computer Science department.  Professor Halstead would make significant contributions in the field of software metrics and decompilers.

Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC) Years

1960s

1968 – Saul Rosen is appointed director of the Computer Sciences Center, which was then renamed to the Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC). Professor Rosen remained director of PUCC until 1987. Also in 1968, John Steele is named the Associate Director of PUCC.

1968 - The Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator (PUFFT) Time Sharing System (PTSS), a joint development between the CS department and the Computer Science Center, enables an IBM 7094 to provide remote access via Teletype Model 33 or IBM 1052 terminals for developing and running Fortran IV programs. Short for the Purdue University Fast Fortran Translator, PUFFT enables thousands of student Fortran jobs to be run each day.

1968 - Construction of the new Mathematical Sciences building is completed at a cost of $3.9M, becoming the home for the offices and classrooms for the mathematics department and mathematics extension, the administrative offices of the School of Science, and the Computer Sciences Center. The new building sits near the former Purdue Hall, which was torn down in 1961. Purdue Hall was one of the first four buildings on campus, opening in 1873 first as the Men's Dormitory. It later served as the first campus library, as a recitation building, and was also used for chemical engineering laboratories, departmental classrooms, and offices for the YMCA and YWCA.

1968 - A Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6600 is installed in the newly constructed Mathematical Sciences Building. The machine room was originally designed to house the new IBM 360 system, which was behind schedule. The elevator shaft had to be widened to deliver the CDC 6600 to the new machine room. 

1968 - The Indiana Regional Computer Network (IRCN) connects several universities across the state to the CDC 6500 and IBM 7094 computers. With funding from the National Science Foundation, ICRN connected Ball State University, Muncie; DePauw University, Greencastle; Hanover College, Hanover; Manchester College, North Manchester; Rose Polytechnic Institute, Terre Haute; St. Joseph’s College, Rensselaer, and Wabash College, Crawfordsville. It also connected four high schools in the West Lafayette area: Lafayette Jefferson, Central Catholic, West Lafayette and Klondike. Purdue regional campuses in Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Hammond and Wabash also participated.

1969 – A used IBM 7094 is acquired for a reported purchase price of $24K and installed in the MATH building machine room as a secondary 7094.

1969 – Development of a front-end system to submit compute jobs to the CDC 6500 supercomputer using an IBM 7094 takes place. This job submission facility is called PROCSY – the Purdue Remote On-line Console System. A 7094 is used as a front-end for terminal access to the systems, and later replaced by Modcomp computers. 

1969 - Dr Duane Pyle leaves Purdue for the University of Houston after serving as assistant director of the Computing Center from 1961 to 1962,  and assistant head of the Computer Science department from 1965 to 1969. Dr. Pyle made significant contributions to early computing and documented in the book Breaking Ground in Computer Science. 

1970s

1970 - A statistical consulting office is formed with funding provided by PUCC to assist students with statistical design and analysis using both BMD and SPSS. The office is led by Dr. George McCabe, professor in the Department of Statistics. Once of the first consultant was Mary Ann Ross, a PUCC employee and grad student. 

1972 (Fall) - According to the Daily News student newspaper in Muncie, Ball State purchases an IBM 360 from Purdue for a price of $381,164 to be used for "research by professors and students, instruction in computer science courses, administrative work and student jobs within the department. A primary use will be for expansion of interactive terminal facilities-equipment to solve programs fed into the computer."  (Perhaps this is the same IBM 360 that was to be delivered in 1968 or perhaps a 360 used by LARS.)

1976 – The CDC 6400 is retired from service, and a second CDC 6500 is acquired and installed in the MATH machine room. 

1978 – The Computer Science department installs its first VAX 11/780.

1980s

1971 (May) - An IBM 7094-1401 is donated to the Purdue Computing Center by the Mobil Oil Corporation. This 7094 is used to support 100 additional terminals, adding to an existing 7094 supporting 60 terminals. These two systems leveraged the PROCSY system as front-ends to to the CDC 6500.

1981 - Dr. Saul Rosen initiates a project to capture the history of Computer Science and computer history at Purdue with Dr. Duane Pyle, with notes edited by Alice Penrod. 

1982 - George Goble and Mike Marsh create dual-CPU support for Unix BSD 4 on the DEC Vax platform. 

1983 (January) – A Control Data Corporation (CDC) Cyber 205 Supercomputer is installed in the MATH data center, with a configuration of a single vector processor, a scalar processor, 106 64-bit words of main memory, and 3 x 109 bytes of disk space. A new underground data center addition was added to the MATH building to accommodate the supercomputer. It was the second installation of a Cyber 205 in the United States. To submit computing jobs to the Cyber 205, the CDC 6500 and VAX 11/780 systems were used as front-end systems. 

1984 - Purdue is awarded $5.5M by the National Science Foundation to purchase access to the Cyber 205. Saul Rosen was the principal investigator. Purdue became one of the first national supercomputing providers, along with the University of Minnesota, and Boeing Computing Service. In the following year, NSF would start the supercomputing centers program, funding National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Cornell Theory Center, and the von Neumann Center.  Note that NCSA, SDSC, and PSC are still supercomputer centers today.

1984 - (Oct) - Purdue hosts the Supercomputer Applications Symposium for some 125 institutions that are using the Control Data Cyber 205. The symposium is to exchange common experiences and to discuss results of research projects performed on the Cyber 205 supercomputer.

1985 (Fall) – The Memorial Gymnasium is renovated and becomes the new home for the Computer Science department on the West Lafayette campus.

1985 (?) – A Sequent Computer Systems Balance 8000 parallel computer system is brought on-line in the MATH data center. This system used National Semiconductor processors, and ran a BSD Unix variant called DYNIX. Later versions installed at Purdue included at least two Sequent Balance 21000 models, with 12 processors, 24M of memory, and 3 single Eagle drives. One of the 21000 models was used as a campus print server. 

1987 (?) – A Sequent Computer Systems Symmetry system is installed in the MATH data center. Similar to the Balance line, the Symmetry uses Intel 80386 processors. At least 2 more Symmetry systems are installed over the next few years. 

1987 – Saul Rosen retires as the Director of the Computing Center.

1987 (June) - The very first Gould NP1 is delivered to Purdue University (Engineering) in June.

1988 – John Steele is named Director of the Purdue University Computing Center. 

1988 (March) – A second CDC Cyber 205 is acquired from a university in Florida in March for $1. It is shipped, installed, and running by late fall in the MATH data center.

1988 (March 7) – The CDC 6600 is retired from service. 

1988 (May) – A DEC VAX 8800 computer running Ultrix 2.2 is installed and made available to campus. Using a grant from the National Science Foundation, the 8800 (mace.cc) is used as a front-end to the Cyber 205 supercomputer. 

1988 (June) – Several new C.itoh Ion Deposition printers are installed across campus.

1988 (Nov 2) - PUCC Unix systems began exhibiting a high-CPU load with unknown activity, later determined to be from the Morris worm. Eugene "Spaf" Spafford would write a comprehensive evaluation titled The Internet Worm Incident about the Morris worm. 

1989 – An AT&T Information Systems Network (ISN) switch is installed, allowing terminals across the campus to “DIAL:” up various computer systems located in the MATH data center. It replaces the Serial Data Switch (SDS). The SDS was designed, built, and maintained by PUCC engineers, and provided serial communication from buildings across campus to computing services in the MATH machine room. 

1989 – Approximately 20 NeXT Computer workstations are installed in MATH B22 for student use. These systems run an operating system called Mach, based on BSD UNIX, and use display postscript for rendering output to the monitor. NeXT was founded by Steve Jobs after his forced exit from Apple Computer. Interestingly, Steve Jobs ordered the first online order of pizza (with tomato and basil) from a NeXT workstation using CyberSlice.

1989 (January) - Computer labs in ENAD are outfitted with Zenith PCs and Apple Macintosh computers and used for student instructional computing. 

1989 (February) - Installation of an ETA-10P supercomputer is installed in the MATH data center. The ETA 10-P was provided by ETA Systems, a spinoff of Control Data created in 1983. The system undergoes configuration and testing before its general availability to campus in January of 1990. The ETAP 10-P was an air-cooled supercomputer. At Purdue, the ETA-10P used a variant of System V UNIX, not the optional EOS operating system (EOS was developed using Cybil and was binary compatible with the earlier VSOS operating system). Just 25 ETA 10 systems were delivered before CDC shut down ETA Systems in April 1989. The hostnames pete.cc and boiler.cc were assigned to the ETA-10P. The ETA-10P was shipped with a set of operator chairs for the console. 

1989 (May) – The last RSTS/E system (RSTS-F) is retired from service. The Resource Sharing Time Sharing Extended (RSTS/E) operating system provided multi-user time-sharing access. RSTS/E was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and ran on the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers, providing general computer access and word processing capability using Word 11.

1989 (July) – The DEC VAX 11/780 (i.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. 

1989 (August) – Three additional DEC VAX 11/780s (k.cc.purdue.edu, h.cc.purdue.edu, s.cc.purdue.edu) are retired from service. These systems provided general UNIX access for various departments, including instructional use.

1989 (August 2) – The Control Data Corporation (CDC) 6500 is officially retired from service and powered off. the 6500 served over two decades of service to the university. The machine is sold to the Chippewa Falls museum in Minnesota, and later (2013) to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, Washington. The museum has the 6500 running, although the future of the museum is now unknown (as of 2022).

1989 (November) – Rob Stanfield moves from the Operations Group to User Services, working under Bill Whitson to support research activity. Primary responsibilities at that time were user support of the computing systems, magnetic tape management, data conversion, research and system usage, Kermit support, documentation development, and the development and teaching of short courses for the research systems and other computing services. 

1990s

1990 (January) – A CDC ETA10-P supercomputer is announced for use on campus. A vector computer, the ETA10-P runs a modified version of AT&T System V Unix and uses the Network Queuing System (NQS) for submitting batch jobs. 

1990 (August 7) – The VAX 11/780 (n.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. 

1990 (September) - The Purdue Computer Emergency Response Team (PCERT) team is established "in response to growing local and national concern about computer security, the Computer Science Department (CS), the Engineering Computer Network (ECN), and the Computing Center (PUCC)  have  formed a cooperative, non-binding  advisory group, called the Purdue Computer Emergency Response Team (PCERT), to consult on computer security issues at Purdue." Gene Spafford was one of the key people in establishing PCERT.  

1991 (June 9) – Saul Rosen, a true pioneer in the computing field, passes away. An abbreviated list of his life accomplishments are available in his IEEE obituary. 

1992 – An Intel Paragon XP/S Model 10 parallel computer (galaxy.cc) is installed in the MATH data center. This system consisted of 140 compute nodes, thirteen I/O nodes, three HIPPI (network) nodes, one Ethernet node, one boot/service node, and four service nodes, based on the Intel i860 RISC microprocessor. 

1992 (December 30) – The DEC VAX 11/780 (j.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This particular VAX was the first Purdue system connected to the ARPAnet, and provided access to early download sites such as simtel20.arpa.

1993 (February) - An IBM 3083 mainframe is installed in the MATH data center to support campus library services. 

1993 (May 23) – The IBM 6670 Information Distributor (LASER1) connected to the VM/CMS system is retired from service.

1993 - An Administrative Computing Master Plan (ACMP)  was completed by MI, establishing campus electronic data as University-owned, and laying the groundwork for administrative and academic data to be used in decision support systems.  

1993 (July) – Carol Shelley, a documentation specialist and maintainer of the PUCC document library, retires. Tom Putnam, manager of User Services, leaves PUCC for a position at Texas A&M. 

1993 (July) - The Computing Center reorganizes into four specific service areas:  Computing Services, Instructional Computing, Purdue Data Network, and Research Computing.

1993 (August) - An announced plan for retirement of the Cyber 205 supercomputers begins. 

1993 (December) - The ETA-10P is retired from service.

1994 (March) - The ETA10P, also known as boiler.cc, is turned off and sent to salvage. The ETA-10P provided 30,588 hours of computing cycles to the Purdue community, in service from February 1989 through December 1993.

1994 (March) - The Versatec electrostatic printing service is retired. The Versatec printers used a long, continuous roll of paper that was periodically removed and separated into individual printouts. This required an operator to separate the individual printouts with a razor blade, "rolling" the printout, and filing each for pickup.

1994 (July 1) - The "LCD" Cyber 205 supercomputer is powered down at 9:45am (Friday).

1994 (Fall) – The first Residential Network (ResNet) on the Purdue campus is enabled in the Hillenbrand Hall residence hall using Data-over-Voice (DOV) modems. Connections speeds of 9600 baud provided internet access to each student dorm room. 

1994 (Fall) - The NeXT workstations in MATH B22 are retired from service. 

1994 (Fall) - The Sequent system expert.cc.purdue.edu becomes a computing home for students through the use of an Individual Instructional Accounts (IIA), which could be used for general computing needs. At that time, students chose their own username. Students could perform general computing needs using the expert system's DYNIX operating system, including the ability to send and receive email. 

1994 (September) - The MATH B6 lab is outfitted with NCD workstations (X19) running the X11 X-Windowing system.

1994 (October) - With the rise in computing needs, the consulting group is split into an Instructional Consulting group, with a general consulting group created and reporting to Rob Stanfield. The MATH Consulting group provided consulting services for PUCC computer systems, the forerunner of the campus IT help desk.

1994 (October) - An IBM RISC/System 6000 Model 590 is installed in the MATH data center. 

1995 (January) - The Zenith Z-29 terminals in the MATH B4 lab are replaced with NCD X11 (NCD19) workstations.

1995 - An IBM Scalable POWER system (cloud.cc.purdue.edu) is deployed. Originally installed with 18 nodes, each node used a POWER-2 processors, 256 MBytes of main memory, 2 MBytes of level 2 cache, and 2 GBytes of local disk space.

1995 (August) - To meet the growing demand for PC access, the MATH B10 area is converted into an overnight lab open from 6pm to 7am with 12 PCs and 12 Macs. The expert.cc server, used for general purpose access, is upgraded to a Sun Microsystems Sparcserver 1000. 

1996 (July 1) – The DEC VAX 8800 (mace.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This system served general purpose research services and was a front-end for access to the Cyber 205.

1996 (July 1) – The first CDC Cyber 205 (LCD) is retired from service.

1997 (January) – Ken Adams, a longtime PUCC employee, passes away at the age of 49. Ken began working at Purdue in 1969, spending a large portion of his tenure in support of the Fortran programming language on several PUCC systems. Many of us will remember the stacks of printed output in Ken's MATH office. 

1997 (January) – The CDC 4680 archive server (keep.cc.purdue.edu) is replaced with a Unitree Mass Storage System running on Sun hardware (fortress.cc.purdue.edu).

1997 (February 28) – The VAX (sage.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service.

1997 (Fall) – Rob Stanfield moves from the User Services group to the Accounts Group. His primary focus is to implement a plan to provide the campus with a single account credential, called the Purdue Career Account, to be used across campus computing systems. The underlying system used to provision the Purdue Career Account is the Account Maintenance System (ACMAINT), originally developed by software engineers at ECN, and jointly implemented by PUCC and ECN. 

1998 (March) - John Steele, Director of the Computer Center, is awarded as the principal investigator an NSF grant of $305k to connect Purdue to the Very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS). This provided high-speed connections between supercomputing centers and to select access points in the United States.

1998 (October 15) - The Sun 3 (csd.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. This system was used as the primary mail and file server for the Computing Services Division (CSD) of PUCC.

1998 (November) - A cluster of IBM RS/6000s is purchased and deployed for various research purposes. Consisting of IBM Model 560s, 580s, 590s, and 595s, the cluster provides batch services using the Network Queueing System (NQS). The hosts are known as rapid.cc, swift.cc flash.cc, lively.cc, quick.cc, fleet.cc, racer.cc and runner.cc.

1998 (December) – The Multimedia Instructional Development Center (MIDC), under the leadership of John Campbell, moves and becomes a part of the Purdue University Computing Center.

1999 (April) – An ACMAINT transaction daemon (transd) was implemented and installed for use on the Student Systems Information (SSINFO)  system, thus joining it to the Purdue Career Account services. This enables students to use their Purdue Career Account to log in to SSINFO, reducing the number of credentials used by students.

1999 (June) – As part of a move to the consolidated Purdue Career Account, students visiting campus for Day on Campus are issued a Day-on-Campus ID card in their enrollment packet. The Day-on-Campus ID card is used to swipe at one of the on-campus labs to activate and set up their Purdue Career Account. Using specially programmed mag-stripe keyboards with custom firmware from Cherry GMBH, the ID card uses a custom application developed by PUCC software engineers. Students are then able to activate their career account credential, find their email address, set up a password, and print a copy of their Purdue Career Account information.

1999 (Fall) - An NCR WorldMark 5100 Teradata database system, donated by NCR and WalMart and valued at $7M, is installed in the MATH machine room to support large-scale database and data warehouse research. The system includes 80 processors, 20G of memory, and 400 drives with 1.6T of storage capacity, and believed to be the largest system in the world.

1999 (Fall) – PUCC begins a second phase of computer account consolidation by merging the Purdue Mail*Hub account with the Purdue Career Account. The Mail*Hub system provided the @purdue.edu email address for faculty, staff, and students. This change provided students, staff, and faculty a single logon credential across all of the various PUCC systems. Once the two usernames were merged, it is considered a coordinated career account, reducing multiple student credentials to a single logon credential.

2000s

2000 (January 6) - The IBM 3090 mainframe (vm.cc.purdue.edu) is retired from service. While primarily used for business computing of the university, it is also used for academic purposes including CPT courses. The system was connected to both the Internet and BITNET networks.

2000 (May 23) – The Intel Paragon XP/S Model 10 parallel computer (galaxy.cc) is retired from service.

2000 (Summer) – The IBM SP-2 parallel computer is upgraded to 64 nodes. Each node used a 375 MHz POWER3-II CPU with 4 GB of RAM. 

ITaP (IT@Purdue) Years

2001 (Fall) – The Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC), Management Information (MI, formerly ADPC), and the Telephone Office (TEL), are merged to form a centralized department called Information Technology at Purdue, or ITaP. James R. Bottum is named the first CIO of the combined departments. Two groups that are performing computer account management are merged under a single unit managed by Rob Stanfield. 

2001 (December) - A $5.3 million project connects Purdue, IU, and IUPUI with an ultra-high-capacity statewide communications system called I-Light. I-Light provides gigabit Ethernet connections between the campus networks at West Lafayette, Indianapolis, and Bloomington.

2002 - Purdue is awarded an $861K grant to build the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization. The center opened in the space formerly occupied by the PMU Billiard Hall. featuring a VR CAVE, a tiled wall, video conferencing capabilities, and haptic devices.

2002 (July) - An IBM RS/6000 Scalable POWERparallel (SP) supercomputer is installed, more than 15 times more powerful as it's current system per John Steele. The SP system contains 272 processors with a total memory of 288 gigabytes.

2003 (March) - A $3.6M gift from Sun Microsystems provided five new Sun Fire 6800 servers and two refurbished Enterprise 10000s for research applications. 

2003 (April) - Purdue deploys its first Beowulf Linux cluster using over 1000 PCs that were previously used in the academic computing labs. The "recycled" cluster initially dubbed "Scrap Iron", later dubbed "Radon", ran until 2018 using a continual refresh of retired lab PCs.

2004 (Summer) - Former PUCC office space in MATH is vacated for academic faculty and graduate students, moving ITAP staff to other spaces around campus, including converted retail space in the Purdue West Shopping Center. 

2004 - In 2004, the former PUCC research computing division is renamed the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) in honor of Saul Rosen.

2004 - The first research community cluster Hamlet is deployed with 4 faculty partners.

2004 (October 11) – The accounts group converts the ACMAINT infrastructure to a new Sun 240 server, and the underlying Oracle database to Sun 440 server hardware. 

2005 - A 1024-node community cluster named Lear is deployed. 

2005 - Purdue is awarded $4M to provide resources to the TeraGrid, an integrated set of high-performance computers, data resources, and tools provided by 11 research partners. Initially, the "Radon" recycled cluster and the IBM SP were offered as shared services to other Teragrid sites. 

2005 (July) – John “JJ” Jackson and Dale Talcott, long-time systems programmers with PUCC and ITAP, leave Purdue. 

2006 - The Lear cluster replaces Radon as Purdue's Teragrid system.

2006 - A Condor pool is made available as a computing resource to the TeraGrid.

2006 (June) – James R. Bottum leaves Purdue for a position as Chief Information Officer at Clemson University in South Carolina.

2006 (November) - Purdue is awarded $6M in support of the NorthWest Indiana Computational Grid (NWICG). Among other resources, the NWICG supported the deployment of an SGI Altix with 512 cores, 1 TB of RAM, and 33 TB of disk.

2006 (July) – Dr. William G. “Gerry” McCartney is named interim Vice President and CIO for Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). Gerry accepts the permanent position as Vice President and CIO in September of 2006.

2007 (Oct) – Wendy Lin, systems programmer with PUCC and ITAP, leaves Purdue.

2007 (November) - Purdue is awarded $1.7M and named one of the High-Performance Computing Operations centers (HPC-OPS) to further support operations of the Lear and Condor systems to the Teragrid.

2008 (May) – The Steele supercomputing cluster is installed in the MATH data center in a single day. It consists of 852 64-bit, 8-core Dell 1950 and 9 64-bit, 8-core Dell 2950 systems with various combinations of 16-32 GB RAM, 160 GB to 2 TB of disk, and 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GigE) and InfiniBand local to each node. The new system debuts at number 105 on the Top 500 list. The cluster is named after John Steele, former Director of the Computing Center. The new Steele cluster replaces Lear as Purdue's Teragrid system.

2008 (June) - An SiCortex SC5832 is deployed in support of research applications. The system uses 40 times less power than traditional supercomputers, containing 972 nodes and 5,832 cores.

2008 (Nov) - An online game is released by RCAC that enables players to run a virtual supercomputer. Called Rack-A-Node, the game enabled players to optimize the supercomputer to deal with waves of science jobs that are submitted, similar to how real supercomputers operate. (Note: Link no longer resolves.)

2010s

2010 (April) - Engineers from Purdue leverage the power-savings mode to enable compute clusters to continue running during a cooling event, the first of its kind to be deployed to nearly 2,000 compute nodes.

2010 (August) - The Steele computing cluster is moved to a new HP POD - Performance-optimized Data Center. The HP POD looks like a shipping container and is optimized for cost and flexibility. Purdue is the first university to install and use the HP POD.

2011 (May) – Chinh Le, research scientist with PUCC and ITAP, retires after serving 19 years at Purdue.

2011 (July) – William I. “Bill” Whitson retires from Purdue. Bill served in several roles, including the manager of the User Services group. Bill began his career at Purdue in 1976. 

2011 (Fall) – A new compute cluster named “Carter” is brought online. Named for Dennis Carter, a Purdue grad who went on to a career at Intel, the cluster features 648 compute nodes with 1,296 processors, with a combined core 10,368. The processing power uses the new Intel Xenon E-5 Sandy Bridge Intel processors, and HP Proliant servers. Interconnects between systems uses the Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, allowing speeds up to 56 Gb/s. It debuts at number 54 on the Top 500 list. 

2012 (July) – Gregory Flint and Paul Townsend, two long-time research staff in PUCC and ITAP, retire from Purdue.

2012 (September) – The Identity and Access Management Office converts the ACMAINT Oracle service over to new Oracle (Sun) 4240 servers. 

2012 (October 3) - William Johnson, a long-time Purdue employee passes away at the age of 67.  Will started his career at Purdue as a systems programmer in the IBM group.

2013 (January) – Scott Ksander, former Associate Director of PUCC and later Chief Information Security Officer, retires from Purdue.  Donnie Alban, an employee at PUCC and ITAP since 1973, also retires. 

2013 (April) – Cherry Delaney, outreach coordinator in the IT Security office retires after 17 years of service with Purdue. 

2013 (June) – The supercomputer Conte is installed in the MATH data center. The system uses HP 580 ProLiant SL250 Generation 8 servers (Gen8). Each server uses two Intel Xeon processors and two Xeon Phi co-processors, connected using Mellanox 56Gb/s Infiniband connections. The system peaks around 943.4 teraflops.  The system is named after Dr. Samuel Conte, a computing pioneer and former dean of the Computer Science department. It debuts at number 28 on the Top 500 list. 

2013 (July) - The SiCortex SC5832 is retired from service. 

2013 (November) – The Steele supercomputing cluster, named after the former Director of the Purdue University Computing Center John Steele, is retired from service. 

2014 (April) – Dave Seaman, a long-time research systems programmer in PUCC and ITAP, retires from the university. Dave began his career at Purdue in 1978.

2014 (September) – The Coates cluster is retired from service. It debuted at number 102 on the Top 500 list. 

2015 (November) – The Rossmann cluster is retired from service.

2016 (December) - The Halstead supercomputing cluster is installed in the MATH data center. Halstead consists of approximately 580 nodes containing two 10-core Intel Xeon CPUs per node, 128 GB of RAM, and Mellanox EDR 100 Gb/s Infiniband interconnects between nodes. The cluster is named after Maurice H. Halstead, an early faculty member of Purdue’s CS department, best known for founding an early approach in the 1970s of defining and measuring software systems and processes, known as software science. 

2017 - Kay Hunt retires from Purdue.

2017 (April) – William I. “Bill” Whitson passes away. 

2018 - Bryan Putnam retires from Purdue. Bryan provided research support for PUCC and ITAP research systems.

2019 (August) - Amber Johnson becomes the first African American PhD graduate in Purdue Computer Science.

2020s

2020 - Phil Cheeseman retires from Purdue. Phil provided research computing support and development and maintenance of the Purdue Extended Plotting Language (PEPL), used to prepare and print output to Calcomp, Versatec, and other printers.

2020 (Fall) - The Bell supercomputer is installed for general use. The system contains 448 Dell compute nodes with two 64-core AMD Epyc “Rome” processors, 256 GB of memory, 8 large 1Tb memory nodes, and 16 AMD Instinct GPU nodes. Storage includes 5 petabyes using the Lustre parallel filesystem. Bell landed at number 431 on the Top500 supercomputing list. The supercomputer is named in honor of nursing professor and continuing education director Clara E. Bell, an African American who helped lead diversity and inclusion efforts in the nursing program. 

2021 - Jeff Schwab retires from Purdue.

2022 (March) - The Anvil supercomputer is deployed, consisting of 1,000 two 64-core AMD Epyc "Milan" nodes, a peak performance of 5.3 petaflops, 32 large memory nodes containing 1 TB of RAM, and 16 nodes with four NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing 1.5 PF of single-precision performance. Interconnects are 100 Gbps Mellanox HDR InfiniBand.

2022 - The Fortress archive system is upgraded to more than 250 Pb of archival storage, using the SpectraLogic TFinity tape ExaScale tape library. The tape library has capacity for up to 9,000 tapes, with two robotic arms for loading tapes.

2022 (Sep) - The Living Computers: Museum + Labs temporarily closes after the death of its founder, Mr. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The CDC 6500 supercomputer originally installed at Purdue was purchased by the museum after its retirement and subsequently restored to running condition. Its future fate, along with the rest of the historical computing systems and artifacts, is currently unknown and to be determined by Vulcan LLC. 

Purdue IT Years

2023 (January) - Purdue rebrands the central IT unit from ITaP to Purdue IT, incorporating the campus academic IT areas into an Academic IT Support unit within the new central Purdue IT organization. A new Distributed Campus Services unit combines the IT units from the regional campuses into the new Purdue IT organization.

2023 (February) - The Negishi high-performance cluster is dedicated for use. The cluster contains 460 compute nodes, 2 64-core AMD Epyc Milan processors (128 cores per node), 256 Gb of memory, 6 large memory nodes with 1Tb of memory, and 15 AMD Instinct M1210 GPUs. The cluster is named after Ei-ichi Negishi, the Herbert C. Brown distinguished professor of chemistry and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

2023 (April) - An additional 104 NVIDIA GPUs are added to the Gilbreth High-Performance Cluster giving it a peak performance of 32 PetaFLOPs. 

2024 (April) - An additional 80 NVIDIA A100 GPUs are added to the Dell PowerEdge xe8545 compute nodes, bringing the Gilbreth cluster to 411 GPUs. This is nearly four times its original capacity. 

2024 (April) - A "modest reduction" in Purdue IT director and manager-level positions is announced by the local TV station. 

2024 (July) - According to a press release by the Seattle Times, the Living Computers: Museum + Labs is now permanently closed, nearly 6 years after the death of its founder, Paul Allen. One of the systems on display was Purdue's old CDC 6500 supercomputer, acquired by the museum and restored to a running stated. The 6500 and many other museum quality systems are headed for auction, according to the article.

2024 (Aug) - A planned $16 million, 21,000-square-foot renovation of the ground and basement floors of the Mathematical Sciences Building is announced by the Purdue Trustees. The project will expand the MATH data center for additional computer servers, with construction expected to begin in May 2025 and be completed by February 2026.

2024 (Sep) - The Purdue CDC 6500 supercomputer previously used at Purdue and owned by the now closed Living Computers: Museum + Labs, is sold at auction to an unknown buyer for a reported price of $252,000.

2024 (Sep) - A new community computing cluster named Gautschi is deployed, named in honor of Professor Walter Gautschi, a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Mathematics. The cluster uses Dell compute nodes containing two 96-core AMD Epyc Genoa processors with 192 cores per node and 384 GB of memory, with 200 Gbps NDR Infiniband interconnects. The system uses Rocky Linux 9 with batch scheduling done using Slurm. 

2025 (Feb) - Upgrades to the Anvil Supercomputer are completed using $5M of grant funds from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot (NAIRR). The upgrades include an additional 21 Dell PowerEdge XE9640 compute nodes with 4 Nvidia 80GB H100 SXM GPUs per node, 1PB of additional flash-based storage, and one additional NDR Infiniband fabric that enables larger AI workloads.