Cluster Computing:

DELL TO SUPPLY AUSTRALIAN CENTER WITH LINUX CLUSTER

The Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications (ac3) will install a 147-node cluster running at some 1.5 teraflops in its Sydney data centre. The new ac3 system, costing about $750,000, will use dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors for each node. The supercomputer will also have 300GB of memory, 1.2TB of storage, and run Red Hat Linux with a 2.4 series kernel.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) and a consortium of NSW universities including the UTS, Sydney University, and UNSW jointly fund ac3. Professor Ross McPhedran from the Sydney University Physics department is one of the principal instigators behind the project.

The system, to be supplied by Dell, is being funded by an initial $500,000 grant from ARC with further funding to be supplied by the university consortium.

The new Linux cluster will join ac3's impressive family of high-performance computing hardware including an NEC SX-5 vector computer and a 64-processor SGI Origin 2400.