Computing resources

The Finance Discipline Group has a high performance computing cluster for use by staff within the Discipline Group for undertaking research. The cluster is composed of eight Atlas nodes and four Helios nodes all running Red Hat Linux. The cluster was established in 2009. The Atlas nodes are designed for doing corse grain computations and the Helios nodes for fine grain computations. The Atlas nodes were upgraded to their current configuration in 2011 and the Helios nodes were last upgraded in 2010 and are scheduled to be upgraded again in 2012. The configuration of the nodes are as follows:

Atlas nodes

2x 3.33 Ghz 12 Mb Level 3 Cache Xeon X5680 (Six Core) 6.4GT/s QPI (Max Turbo Freq. 3.6 GHz)
24 Gb( 6 x 4 Gb) DDR3-1333 ECC Memory (Triple Channel)
2 x 500 Gb 7,200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (Raid)

Helios nodes

2x 3.2 Ghz 8 Mb cache Quad Core Xeon W5580 6.4GT/sec QPI (Max Turbo Freq. 3.46 GHz)
48 Gb(12 x 4 Gb) DDR3-1333 ECC Memory (Triple Channel)
2 x 320 Gb 7,200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (Raid)
NVIDIA Tesla C2050 (3 Gb of memory and 448 CUDA cores) (GPU)

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

Staff within the Discipline Group also have access to supercomputing resources at the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Cummunications (aC3)