The system, located at the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications (ac3) in Sydney's Australian Technology Park, is powered by 155 dual Xeon Dell machines with 2 gigabytes of memory each. It runs the Linux operating system and can sustain calculations of 1.07 teraflops a second.
A teraflop is equal to a trillion floating point operations (flops) per second.
That amount of computing power puts it on par with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's next supercomputing project, which is based on NEC technology. That system will handle 1.15 teraflops per second out of the box, with plans to boost it to 1.8 teraflops per second in the near future.
Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology also has a teraflop capable clustered supercomputer, comprising of 240 Intel CPUs.
The ac3 supercomputer was bought using a grant from the Australian Research council and contributions from UTS, Sydney University, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, and the University of Wollongong.
ac3's chief executive, Dr Philip McCrea believes the supercomputer will have applications across many disciplines. "Access to such a powerful resource will make a tremendous contribution to a diverse range of research projects which include development of new photonic technology, new microwave technologies, modelling of the effects of land cover changes, the design of new drugs, and improved mobile communication reception," he said in a statement.
While the system may look impressive on a local scale, it ranks fairly low in comparison to some of the world's fastest computers. According to top500.org, the top spot belongs to NEC's Earth Simulator supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan. It hammers along at 35.86 teraflops per second. Hewlett Packard's ASCI Q system at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. comes in second spot managing to sustain 13.88 teraflops per second.
However clustered supercomputers have their critics. SGI's chief executive and CEO last year told ZDNet Australia clustered PC's are a poor alternative to the real thing.
"It's called B-grade science... causing Australians to think they have high-performance computing when they don't, and they can't be part of the leading edge," he said.
Clusters give theoretical horsepower, he said, but you can't get good utilisation of those processor cycles when modelling complex, non-linear systems. "You bought them cheaply, but you can't use them," he said.
