National Computing Facility for Lattice Gauge Theory

The Adelaide University is home to the National Computing Facility for Lattice Gauge Theory (NCFLGT). The NCFLGT was funded in January 2000 with $480,000 from the Australian Research Council through the Research Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Scheme (RIEF) and with matching funds from the participating institutions of $207,000. The NCFLGT involves a collaboration between The University of Adelaide, The University of Melbourne, and The University of New South Wales. The NCFLGT is a result of a proposal by Associate Professor Tony Williams (Manager of the Facility), Dr. Derek Leinweber, and Professor Tony Thomas from Adelaide University together with Associate Professor Chris Hamer (University of New South Wales) and Professor Bruce McKellar (University of Melbourne).

The proposal lead to the purchase and construction of the Orion supercomputer, valued at $3.6 million. This was made possible by the establishment of a partnership between Sun Microsystems, the NCFLGT, and the Special Research Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter (CSSM). The generous ongoing support of our research by Sun Microsystems through this partnership is gratefully acknowledged.

The Orion Supercomputer is being managed in a cooperative arrangement between the CSSM, the Distributed and High-Performance Computing (DHPC) Group and the South Australian Center for Parallel Computing (SACPC) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide.

The NCFLGT is indebted to Paul Coddington (DHPC/CSSM), Ramona Adorjan (CSSM/Physics) and Francis Vaughan (SACPC) who provide invaluable assistance and advice in the day-to-day management and maintenance of Orion.

Orion supercomputer

Orion is a Sun Technical Compute Farm consisting of 40 E420R nodes connected by a high-speed Myrinet network, as well as standard 100 Mbit/s switched Fast Ethernet. Each E420R has 4 UltraSPARC II 450MHz processors, giving a total of 160 processors, with 4MB of cache and 1GB of RAM on each processor. The peak speed of the machine is 144 Gflops and it has a total of 640 MB of cache memory, 160 GB of RAM and 720 GB of disk.

When installed, Orion achieved a sustained performance of 110 GFlops out of a theoretical peak performance of 144 GFlops on the Linpack benchmark. We may yet improve on this slightly. This put Orion at number 188 in the November 2000 list of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world!

For an explanation of the current place of Orion in the list of the Top 500 follow this link.

Orion users can find information on using the machine in the User's Guide to Orion.

On the name Orion - "Great Hunter"

In astronomy a "constellation" is a collection of stars/suns which are associated with some mythological being. Our Sun technical compute farm was named after the Orion constellation. Orion was the great hunterin greek mythology and moves with his hunting dog Sirius at his feet. There are several versions of the ancient mythological stories regarding Orion the Hunter. You can see more details about the Orion Constellation here. You can find definitions of astronomical terms in an astronomy dictionary.

The Orion Constellation is one of a band of 12 constellations along the ecliptic, which are referred to as the Zodiac. The constellations in the Zodiac include: Capricorn (the goat), Aquarius (the water bearer), Pisces (the fish), Aries (the ram), Taurus (the bull), Gemini (the twins), Cancer (the crab), Leo (the lion), Virgo (the virgin), Libra (the balance), Scorpio (the scorpion), and Sagittarius (the archer). One version of the mythology of Orion has him killed by the sting of the scorpion, which is why the two constellations of Orion and Scorpio are never visible at the same time so that Orion can never again be harmed by the scorpion.

Orion is also the name of a "hunter" anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft used for example by the Royal Australian Air Force