Hydra

Hydra is a cluster computer built from commodity hardware components (almost) identical to the computer under your desk and powered by Debian/GNU Linux. Using these cheap components, we can buy a total computing power, which would be by a factor of ten more expensive if built as a classical super computer.

Hydra currently consists of 162 processors distributed over five racks of altogether 81 computing nodes equipped with two Intel Xeon processors with 2.8 GHz and 1 GB RAM each. Everything is connected via a simple switched 100 MBit Ethernet. Data produced during the number crunching runs are stored on an 730 GB external RAID array.

Hydra has been hired to help us resolve the mysteries of "strongly correlated electron and quantum spin systems, aspects of frustration in condensed matter, protein folding, role of long-range electrostatics interactions in biological materials, physics of vortex lines in type-II superconductors as well as other topics" by means of large scale, massively parallel computer simulation studies.

Hydra dwells at the Department of Physics of the University of Waterloo. Anyone who dares to try cut one of her seven heads off is invited to come and challenge her ...

We are not sure yet whether the name is an acronym, but sometimes we read it as "[HY]yper [D]ense [R]esearch [A]utomat".