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The South Australian Computational Chemistry Facility operates a Beowulf computing cluster for use by chemists at Adelaide and Flinders Universities. The Facility is funded by an Australian Research Council grant under the Research Infrastrucure Equipment and Facilities (RIEF) Program, together with the partner institutions.
Our Beowulf computing cluster, which we call Perseus, is currently under development, but currently consists of:
8 x 400 MHz dual processor Intel Pentium/II compute nodes,
8 x 450 MHz dual processor Intel Pentium/III compute nodes,
1 x 400 MHz dual processor Intel Pentium/II server node, and
2 x 400 MHz dual processor Intel Pentium/II user interface nodes.
Each node has a minimum of 256 Mb of RAM and has a 4 Gb local hard disk primarily used for swap space and scratch use. The cluster has a total of 30 Gb of user disk space and has writeable CD-ROM capability on the user nodes. The operating system is Linux.
We are currently scaling up to increase the cluster size to over 128 dual processor Pentium nodes. We'll include a photo to show this impressive facility once it is all in place.
In the meantime, here's what our current system looks like.......
From the front:
And from the back:
We currently have the following computational chemsitry software installed on Perseus.
Gaussian 94
Gaussian 98
GaussView 2.0
GAMESS-US
More software will be added in the near future.
Technical Paper: "Commodity Cluster Computing for Computational Chemistry"
If you have any questions or comments about our new cluster, or this web site, contact Dr Mark Buntine of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Adelaide.
The cluster is being built and tested by the Distributed High Performance Computing Group (DHPC) within the Department of Computer Science at Adelaide University.
We have been performing some benchmarking calculations using this cluster to show that Beowulfs are an ecconomic means of achieving supercomputing resources not normally affordable by smaller research groups or institutions. The results of this benchmarking will be posted to this site in the near future.
Of course, chemsits at Adelaide and Flinders are still heavy users of the computers operated by the South Australian Centre for Parallel Computing (SACPC).