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Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science

High Performance Computing Facility

The MACCS High Performance Computing facility (known as Fluffy) is a 28 node (56 CPU) beowulf-style cluster available to MACCS researchers to run computationally intensive models.

HPC Cluster

54 CPU Xserve HPC Cluster

Cluster technical detailsSample pic.

The management/login node is an Apple Xserve server running Mac OS X Server 10.4.11. It is powered by dual 2.0Ghz G5 processors with 3GB of ECC memory and 160GB of storage.

The compute nodes are Apple Xserve cluster nodes running Mac OS X 10.4.7. They are powered by dual 2.0Ghz G5 processors with 512MB of ECC memory and 80GB of storage. The cluster has a theoretical peak performance of 243 Gigaflops (Flops = floating point operations per second) for double precision floating point calculations.

A Cisco Catalyst 2948G-GE-TX gigabit Ethernet switch is used for the interconnect as well as the management network.  Job submission is managed with Apple's Xgrid software.

More Information

  • Apple recently conducted a case study on MACCS' use of an Xserve cluster for our research.
  • For more information about how to use the cluster for your research please contact Steven Saunders or Craig Richardson.

Xgrid monitor

Screenshot from "XGrid Admin" application showing cluster running 6 jobs