Hardware

Orion is a Sun Technical Compute Farm, which is a cluster of multi-processor Sun E420R workstations. The cluster consists of 40 E420R nodes, connected by 100 Mbit/s switched Fast Ethernet, as well as a high-speed copper Myrinet network(1.2 Gbit/s).

Each E420R has four UltraSPARC II 450MHz processors (each with a 4 MByte L2 cache), 4 GBytes of memory and 18 GBytes of disk. Orion therefore has a total of 160 processors, 640 MBytes of cache memory, 160 GBytes of RAM and 720 GBytes of disk. The UltraSPARC architecture allows two floating point operations per clock cycle, so the peak speed of the machine is 144 GFlops.

A dual processor Sun Ultra 80 is used as the front end (or host) for the cluster. It has the same processors as the cluster, and 1 GB of memory.

Orion User's Guide