Apple has donated to UCI a small computational cluster based on its XServe product line.
This three-server cluster (two computational nodes and one control or “head” node) is built on the PowerPC chip. Each node features two 2Ghz PPC CPUs. The cluster also offers a 1.2Tb (1200 Gigabytes) disk array. The PowerPC architecture features high-performance true 64-bit floating point arithmetic, and is particularly well-suited for floating point and vector calculations.
Originally, NACS and faculty evaluated batch processing systems for the cluster under the Macintosh OS X operating system. Currently the cluster is running Linux, because faculty tend to be more familiar with that operating system, and to take advantage of the richer software development environment available under Linux.
GNU compilers for C, C++, and Fortran are available on the cluster, as well as the optimized IBM C/C++ compiler suite for PowerPC. Faculty may contact NACS for accounts, assistance with porting, and benchmarking.