Perseus- Overview

Perseus is a high-performance Beowulf cluster dedicated to computational chemistry applications. It is the main compute resource of the South Australian Computational Chemistry Facility (SACCF).

The cluster is used by chemists at the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. It is mainly used to run software packages such as Gaussian and GAMESS for determining the electronic structure of molecules, as well as force field molecular dynamics codes such as CHARMM and NAMD.

Perseus was designed and constructed by the Distributed and High-Performance Computing (DHPC) Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide. It consists of 116 dual-Pentium PCs (i.e. 232 processors) connected on a private subnet with 100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet using Intel 510 switches. An additional 3 nodes are used as front ends to interface to the cluster, to host the user file systems and provide backup capabilities.

The aim was to provide the most cost-effective computer for these kinds of computational chemistry programs, to create a software environment that makes it easy to run large numbers of batch jobs and to store, process and visualize the data produced by the simulations.

Perseus cost approximately $AU300,000 (around $US200K) and has a peak speed of 113 Gflops (double precision). The full machine was up and running in early March 2000, at which time it was the second-fastest computer in Australia, behind the NEC SX-5 supercomputer at the Bureau of Meteorology/CSIRO Joint HPCC Centre that is used to generate the weather forecasts for Australia. The SX-5 was installed at about the same time as Perseus and has a slightly higher peak speed of 128 Gflops, but cost well over 10 times as much. This illustrates the price/performance advantages of Beowulf clusters. Perseus is the largest and fastest PC cluster in Australia, and one of the largest in the world.

The SACCF was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (RIEF) Program Grant and contributions from the University of Adelaide and Flinders University.

Perseus User's Guide