  We present results for the static interquark potential, light meson and
baryon masses, and light pseudoscalar meson decay constants obtained from
simulations of domain wall QCD with one dynamical flavour approximating the $s$
quark, and two degenerate dynamical flavours with input bare masses ranging
from $m_s$ to $m_s/4$ approximating the $u$ and $d$ quarks. We compare these
quantities obtained using the Iwasaki and DBW2 improved gauge actions, and
actions with larger rectangle coefficients, on $16^3\times32$ lattices. We seek
parameter values at which both the chiral symmetry breaking residual mass due
to the finite lattice extent in the fifth dimension and the Monte Carlo time
history for topological charge are acceptable for this set of quark masses at
lattice spacings above 0.1 fm. We find that the Iwasaki gauge action is best,
demonstrating the feasibility of using QCDOC to generate ensembles which are
good representations of the QCD path integral on lattices of up to 3 fm in
spatial extent with lattice spacings in the range 0.09-0.13 fm. Despite large
residual masses and a limited number of sea quark mass values with which to
perform chiral extrapolations, our results for light hadronic physics scale and
agree with experimental measurements within our statistical uncertainties.
