Steele nodes ran Red Hat Enterprise Linux starting with release 4.0[1] and used Portable Batch System Professional 10.4.6 (PBSPro 10.4.6) for resource and job management.
[4][5] In 2010, Steele was moved to an HP Performance Optimized Datacenter, a self-contained, modular, shipping container-style unit installed on campus in order to make room for new clusters in Purdue's main research computing data center.
Steele users came fields such as aeronautics and astronautics, agriculture, biology, chemistry, computer and information technology, earth and atmospheric sciences, mathematics, pharmacology, statistics, and electrical, materials and mechanical engineering.
The cluster was used to design new drugs and materials, to model weather patterns and the effects of global warming, and to engineer future aircraft and nano electronics.
Steele also served the Compact Muon Solenoid Tier 2 Center at Purdue, one of the particle physics experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider.
Unused, or opportunistic, cycles from Steele were made available to the TeraGrid and the Open Science Grid using Condor software.