Hydra is a general-purpose supercomputing facility purchased in 2003 in partnership with IBM, funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities Scheme (LIEF), with matching funds from eResearch SA's partner universities, a number of research groups, and a generous donation from Myricom Inc.

Hydra is an IBM eServer 1350 Linux cluster with 129 nodes and a peak performance of 1.2 TFlops. Each node has dual 2.4 GHz Xeon (Pentium 4) processors and 2 GBytes of RAM, with Myrinet networking on 128 of the nodes.

Hydra was the second-fastest computer in Australia when installed in June 2003. It was ranked 106th in the June 2003 list of the Top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, with a measured Linpack benchmark result of 840 GFlops.

Hydra is used for a variety of applications including computational physics, chemistry, biotechnology, engineering, geoscience, petroleum engineering, applied mathematics, water resource management, and computational fluid dynamics.

For more information, see the Hydra User Guide.