The Hardware The HPCC consists of a Sun E3500 Enterprise Server and a Linux farm based on dual Alpha processors: The Sun E3500 (called "helix" on the Field Museum intranet) has 4 UltraSparc II 400MHz CPUs, 1GB RAM, 6 9GB FC-AL hard drives, a DDS3-DAT drive, and a 10/100 Mbps network card. Solaris 7 and all current patches have been applied (including the necessary private patches). Using Sun's DiskSuite, the drives are configured with RAID 5 to provide some degree of redundancy and protection in the event of a disk failure. The machine is plugged into an APC SmartUPS 2200XLT that protects the machine from sudden power failures; in the event of a power outage, the machine will automatically shut itself down. The Linux farm (alpha compute nodes) consists of a dual Intel PIII 500MHz server node, called "phyla". Compute nodes are dual alpha 21264 500 MHz systems (fern, lichen, bird, moth, fly, dino) from Microway. A single Alpha 21164 600MHz system (flower), also from Microway, serves as a test machine on which programs are compiled and tested prior to installation on the compute nodes. The compute nodes and the test node are isolated from the Museum network, being connected via ethernet and a Cisco switch to the server node. These machines are all protected from power interruptions by an APC Matrix 5000XR and will shutdown automatically when battery levels become dangerously low. An additional Linux machine (called hpcc) equiped with a Pentium III running at 500 MHz is used as a secure gateway to handle access from outside the Museum.
						Benchmarks index for integer and floating point calculations. Marked in red are the alpha 21264 processors, in blue the Pentium 3 (PCs) and in yellow the PowerPC G3/G4 (Macs). Higher is better. Note the high floating point results of the alpha processors. Most phylogenetic programs use floating point calculations extensively.
		Figure 1: helix, the Sun E3500 Enterprise Figure 1: Server with 4 UtraSparc II Processors.		Figure 2: The Linux farm. One dual Pentium III server Figure 2: node and six dual alpha compute nodes.