The Theory Cluster

Department of Physics, Brown University

The High Energy Theory and Condensed Matter Theory research groups in the Department of Physics formed the Theory Computer Cluster as a cooperative venture in developing a high performance scientific compute facility. The Cluster is distributed over the Barus & Holley building, home of the Physics Department, and its machines are accessible from over thirty X Windows-capable terminals.

In August 1995 the Theory cluster acquired a Cray EL98, with a peak speed over 1Gflop. In Q3 1996, the cluster will take delivery on its second Cray supercomputer, which is expected to be a J916, as pictured below.

pion is the central machine for the High Energy Theory research group. pion is a Sun Microsystems Sparc 10 with four Ross CPUs and 128MB memory. It provides both computational and general facilities to its users.

barus, a Sun Sparc 20 with 96MB memory, is the Department of Physics central Unix facility. All graduate students have access to barus.

hbar, a Sun Sparc 5 with 32MB memory, provides support services to the High Energy Theory group.

tauneu, lepton, and quark are Silicon Graphics workstations used by members of the High Energy Theory group for local small- to medium-scale computation.

purgatory, taichi, and yollabolly are IBM RS/6000s available to the Condensed Matter Theory group for local calculations.

Additional computing facilities are provided by Computing and Information Services in the Center for Information Technology.

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