legion
High Performance
Workstation Farm
This is the Home-Page for legion - the front-end to the High Performance Parallel and Batch farms at ITS.

legion

legion is a Compaq PW600au. It has 512MByte of memory and currently is the NFS server for the user directories for users of the parallel and batch farms. It has reasonably high power graphics capability to allow users to visualize results of complex calculations or implement image manipulation software. For more complexe visualization requirements, users should visit the CVF.

Batch farm

The batch facility consists of 12 compute nodes, all of which are Digital DS-10 Alpha Servers (4), also known as the bnet machines, and DS-10L servers (8), or the anet machines. Their function is to provide powerful (twice that of the 600au) serial processing capabilities, in excess of that which users would generally have access to in their normal environment.

Batch farm CPU Usage Statistics

More detailed usage statistics can be found for the anets and bnets.

Parallel farm

The parallel farm consists of 16 compute nodes. All are Digital 600au Personal Workstations. Each node has significantly better CPU performance than the CPUs in either the Cray J90 (argolis) or the DEC 8400 (murlibobo) however the inter-node bandwidth is only 10MByte/s so parallel jobs need a fair degree of task independence to obtain good scaling relative to single node performance. Typical problems which achieve good scaling include Monte-Carlo methods, 3D rendering and ray-tracing, etc.

Parallel farm CPU Usage Statistics

Pictures of various pieces of HPC equipment, including the farm

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Created: January 1999
Maintainer: Research Computing Services
Information Services
The University of Melbourne
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Last modified: 4 September 2003
Access: Unrestricted
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