SAPAC Sytems Overview

SAPAC runs a number of supercomputers, available for use to researchers both in the educational and industry sectors, and to commerical users. These provide such users with access to high-performance computing when applications or time constraints require.

SAPAC maintains the hardware and software of these systems, and runs a Helpdesk to assist users with problems related to use of these facilities.

Corvus is SAPAC's latest supercomputer. It is an SGI Altix XE1300, with 68 compute nodes, each with a dual-Intel "Clovertown" quad-core processor- effectively, 544 computational cores.

Initial installation and testing is under way, as of early May 2007.

Aquila- SGI Altix 300

Aquila is SAPAC's second-most-recent supercomputer. It is an SGI Altix 3000, with 160 Intel Itanium 1.3 GHz processors. It has 160 GB of RAM which can be shared between the processors in various ways- for example, 160 processors each with 1 GB of RAM, or 1 processor accessing 160 GB of RAM.

Peak operating speed is estimated at 830 gigaflops. NUMA architecture is used for system communication.

A User's Guide is here.

Hydra - IBM eServer

Hydra is a general-purpose supercomputing facility that purchased in 2003 in a partnership arrangement with IBM. It is an IBM eServer 1350 Linux cluster with 129 nodes.

Each node has dual 2.4 GHz Xeon (Pentium 4) processors and 2 GBytes of RAM, with Myrinet networking on 128 of the nodes. Hydra is one of the fastest supercomputers in Australia, with a theoretical peak speed exceeding 1.2 Teraflops. It was ranked #106 in the November 2003 list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world.

For more detailed information consult the User Guide

Orion - Sun Technical Compute Farm

The Sun Technical Compute Farm is a cluster of Sun E420R workstation nodes. Each E420R node has 4 UltraSPARC II 450MHz processors, each with 4MB of cache, and up to 4GB of RAM per node.

The National Computing Facility for Lattice Gauge Theory has a Sun Technical Compute Farm, consisting of 40 nodes connected by a Myrinet network, with a total of 160 processors, 640 MB of cache memory, 160 GB of RAM and 720 GB of disk. Orion has a theoretical peak floating-point performance of 144 Gflops.

Orion was the fastest computer in Australia when it was installed in June 2000. It ranked #188 in the November 2000 list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, with a Linpack benchmark result of 110 GFlops.

For more detailed information consult the User Guide

Perseus (now Titan) - Beowulf PC Cluster

The South Australian Computational Chemistry Facility has a 232 processor Beowulf PC cluster called Perseus, with 116 dual processor (mostly 500 MHz Pentium IIIs) PC nodes connected by 100 Mbit/s switched Ethernet. Perseus has a theoretical peak floating-point performance of 113 GFlops.

When commissioned in March 2000, Perseus was the largest and fastest cluster in Australia and one of the largest PC clusters in the world.

For more detailed information consult the User Guide. Note that since Perseus has been relocated and upgraded, some operational procedures have changed- please contact the Help Desk for more information.

NOTE: Perseus has been decomissioned as a research machine, and is now used as a teaching and training machine, known as Titan.

User's Guides / Manuals

User Manual pages for the SAPAC systems may be found via the links in the "Information about... Facilities...Systems" menu item in the navigation top bar, or via the links listed below.

These will change over time as software/hardware items are updated.

Aquila
Hydra
Orion
Perseus (now known as Titan)
Titan
Other SAPAC systems