  A novel metric is introduced to compare the supercomputing resources
available to academic researchers on a national basis. Data from the
supercomputing Top 500 and the top 500 universities in the Academic Ranking of
World Universities (ARWU) are combined to form the proposed "500/500" score for
a given country. Australia scores poorly in the 500/500 metric when compared
with other countries with a similar ARWU ranking, an indication that HPC-based
researchers in Australia are at a relative disadvantage with respect to their
overseas competitors. For HPC problems where single precision is sufficient,
commodity GPUs provide a cost-effective means of quenching the computational
thirst of otherwise parched Lattice practitioners traversing the Australian
supercomputing desert. We explore some of the more difficult terrain in single
precision territory, finding that BiCGStab is unreliable in single precision at
large lattice sizes. We test the CGNE and CGNR forms of the conjugate gradient
method on the normal equations. Both CGNE and a modified form of CGNR (with
restarts) provide reliable convergence for quark propagator calculations in
single precision.
