With plans to create a Virtual Campus, Purdue's Envision Center was looking for a graphics cluster that was powerful, space efficient and could serve as a dual boot machine. The goal of the project was to create a 3D replica of Purdue's West Lafayette campus. The vision: a general use tool that could demonstrate the capabilities of various display systems within the Purdue Envision Center. What they found was that their quest to find a system to meet their graphics, power, and spacing needs was nearly impossible to achieve.

General Atomics was seeking an economical high performance computing solution to run its small and intermediate simulations of toroidally-confined plasmas using GYRO, NIMROD and ORBIT-RF. Toroidally-confined plasmas (or Tokamaks) are massively-parallel simulations that require floating point and high network performance. Using external accounts at large super computing centers slowed productivity due to the amount of time waiting for compute cycles.