Computing resources

We have a high performance computing cluster for use by academic staff within the group for undertaking research. The cluster is composed of eight Atlas nodes, four Helios nodes and three Apollo graphics terminals all running Red Hat Linux. The Atlas nodes are designed for doing coarse grain computations and the Helios nodes for fine grain computations. Both the Atlas and Helios nodes were upgraded in the first half of 2009. The configuration of the nodes are as follows:

Atlas nodes

2x 3.33 Ghz 2x6 Mb cache Quad Core Xeon X5470 1333 MHz FSB
8 Gb 667 MHz DDR2-Ram
2 x 73 Gb 15,000 RPM SAS Hard drive (Raid 1)

Helios nodes

2x 3.2 Ghz 8 Mb cache Quad Core Xeon W5580 6.4GT/sec QPI
24GB(6x4GB)DDR3-1333 ECC Memory
2 x 146 Gb 15,000 RPM SAS Hard drive (Raid 1)

Apollo graphics terminals

2.66 GHz 4 Mb Cache E6700 Core 2 (dual core) with 1066 MHz FSB
4 Gb 667 MHz DDR2-Ram
2 x 250 Gb 7,200 RPM SATA II Hard drives (Raid 0)
DVD+RW Drive (Dual Layer)
Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 256 Mb Graphics Card
20" Ultrasharp LCD monitor

Staff have access to a range of Fortran and C compilers on the cluster as well as Mathematica, Matlab, OX and IMSL Fortran numerical libraries. The clusters are configured for undertaking parallel processing computations with either LAM or MPICH.

Staff also have access to supercomputing resources at the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications (aC3)