legion
		High Performance Workstation Farm

The farm consists of 16 compute nodes and a front-end/server node. All are Digital 600au Personal Workstations. The front-end has reasonably high power graphics capability to allow users to visualize results of complex calculations or implement image manipulation software. It is intended that the front end should be located in an area accessable to research users (in the ITC).

Each node in the farm 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 high degree of task independence to obtain good scaling relative to single node performance. Examples of problems which should achieve good scaling include Monte-Carlo methods, 3D rendering and ray-tracing, etc.

Parallel Farm CPU Usage Statistics

Pictures of the farm