iVEC primarily communicates through regular updates to the iVEC Friends email list (click here to sign up) but here are a selection of news releases from recent years.
iVEC@UWA supercomputer ushers in new era of data-intensive research - 23 September 2011
Australia moves a step closer to the top ranks of global supercomputing with The University of Western Australia’s purchase of the “Fornax” supercomputer, allowing scientists to explore new vistas of high-powered data-intensive research.
The supercomputer purchase is part of an $80m Australian Government Super Science Initiative to bolster Australia’s bid for the Square Kilometre Array through the creation of the Pawsey Centre, a petascale supercomputing facility supporting radio astronomy and boosting Australian supercomputing resources for data-intensive research in areas such as nanoscience, geoscience and other computational communities.
Fornax is Latin for ‘furnace’ and is the name of a southern hemisphere constellation identified by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. This name is representative of the supercomputer’s capability for dealing with data-intensive problems, which is expected to be of particular use to the radio astronomy computing community.
Representing the second pathfinder system in the Pawsey Centre project that will see a purpose-built supercomputer facility constructed at CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) in Kensington, Fornax will be located in The University of Western Australia’s Physics Building as part of the iVEC@UWA Facility. As part of the Pawsey Centre project, Fornax will be managed and operated by WA supercomputing leader iVEC.
The supercomputer system procured from SGI comprises 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU and 72 GB RAM, resulting in a system containing 1152 cores and 96 GPUs.
The system also has a 500 TB global filesystem, in addition to each node having 7 TB of local disk space. One distinguishing feature of the system, allowing it to tackle data-intensive problems, is the presence of two InfiniBand networks. The first allows each node to access the global filesystem, while the second allows nodes to access the local disks on neighbouring nodes. This dual-rail system also allows separation of MPI traffic from storage traffic.
The networking component comprises a Cisco Nexus 7009 switch located at UWA to provide layer 3 services, and two Cisco Nexus 5548 layer 2 switches for connectivity to the front-ends of the SGI compute system, along with passive 8-channel coarse and dense wave division multiplexors providing multiple 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections across a single fibre pair back into the core of the iVEC metropolitan area network at the ARRC facility.
The Nexus 7009 switch includes dual supervisors and M1 linecards for redundancy, and supports a total of 80 SFP- and X2-based 10 GbE interfaces. The Nexus 5548 switches provide a total of 96 10 GbE ports at full line rate, and will be connected via a virtual port channel to the Nexus 7009. The SGI front-end nodes will be dual-connected to the Nexus 5548 switches for redundancy.
The procurement also includes concomitant upgrades to the core of the iVEC network for connectivity to the Nexus 7009, and to increase the bandwidth into iVEC's Petascale Data Store, also located at ARRC.
Professor Andrew Rohl, iVEC Executive Director, said: “Fornax is a machine tailored for data-intensive computing in such areas as radio astronomy and the geosciences.
“The combination of GPUs and fast local disk distributed between neighbouring compute nodes provides a unique system for our data-intensive researchers.”
WA soars into top 100 supercomputer list - 18/11/2010
For the first time in history, Western Australia has entered the prestigious ranks of the top 100 supercomputers on the planet, thanks to iVEC’s installation of a Performance Optimised Data Centre (POD) at its Murdoch facility.
A global gauge of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the prestigious Top 500 List has embraced the Hewlett-Packard (HP)-developed POD, which takes its place at #87 following its delivery to iVEC@Murdoch.Only one other Australian supercomputer ranks above the POD in the Top 500 list, with the National Computational Infrastructure facility in Canberra coming in at #51.
The POD is Stage 1A of the $80M Pawsey Centre project, commissioned under the Commonwealth government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative to establish a petascale supercomputing facility. The construction of the following stages, to be housed at various iVEC facilities in coming years, will eventually see the Pawsey Centre climb to the top echelon of the world’s supercomputing centres and establish Australia’s commitment to supercomputing.
When complete in early 2013, the final Pawsey Centre is expected to operate up to 15 times faster than the POD.
“Australia is looking to build three petascale systems in the next few years, which is an extraordinary leap,” iVEC Executive Director Professor Andrew Rohl said.
“Enabling our users to access advanced resources in the 100 TeraFLOPS range, through the HP POD system, will provide them the opportunity to grow into the petascale era.”
Incorporating modified shipping container architecture, the POD design allows rapid setup compared to similar-sized systems, creating a ‘plug and play’ compute cluster requiring simple connection to networking and power.
The cluster is an energy-efficient 87.20 TeraFLOPS system (1 TeraFLOPS = one trillion floating point operations per second), using HP ProLiant Blade servers with 1600 of the latest generation Intel® Xeon® 5600 processors, totalling 9,600 cores and with 500 terabytes of high-performance storage all connected via 4x infiniband. Housed at Murdoch University, the cluster will be connected to iVEC's Metropolitan Area Network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.
iVEC@Murdoch Associate Director, Professor Matthew Bellgard, said the ranking in the world's top 100 supercomputers confirmed the extraordinary increase in locally-available computational capacity.
“Australian scientists are now generating massive amounts of experimental data in computationally demanding areas such as radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and life science.
“The facility represents a major advancement in computational research in Australia where scientific discovery is largely dependent on the ability to process masses of information as quickly as possible.
“What has been recognised by the ranking is the fact that the supercomputer will enable processing of data at speeds which we have not previously encountered.”
Professor Bellgard said the approach to housing the HP supercomputer in a self-contained energy efficient POD, was just one of the many innovations that the supercomputer possessed.
MEDIA CONTACT: David Satterthwaite, iVEC Marketing and Communications ManagerEmail: davids@ivec.org Phone: (08) 64368959
About iVEC:iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO and the four public WA universities with funding from the State Government. iVEC fosters and promotes scientific and technological innovation through the provision of supercomputing and eResearch services to the research community, commercial organisations and government agencies. In 2009, iVEC was charged with establishing and operating the $80 million Pawsey Centre by the Australian government.
About the Pawsey Centre:The Pawsey Centre (named after Dr Joseph Pawsey, an Australian pioneer in the field of radio astronomy) was officially launched by Senator Kim Carr, Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 27 August 2009. The Centre will be located adjoining CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in the Technology Park, Perth, Western Australia. As a supercomputing facility, it is expected to be amongst the top 20 supercomputers in the world at the time of its commissioning in 2013.
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Thinking Inside the Box - 4/8/2010
Although it may look like an ordinary shipping container on the outside, iVEC’s new POD (Performance Optimised Data Centre) from Hewlett-Packard will launch iVEC into the top 100 supercomputing centres on the planet.
The supercomputer system is part of the Commonwealth government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative and will result in a massive increase in iVEC’s supercomputing capability, providing a major boost to the resources available to the radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and other leading computational communities.
The POD design incorporates a modified shipping container architecture to create a ‘plug and play’ containerised server cluster that will allow the first phase of the Pawsey Centre project to be online by November 2010, only four months after the acquisition deal was finalised.
This purchase is the first step in creating a world-leading supercomputing architecture to enhance Australia and New Zealand’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The supercomputer, part of the $80M Pawsey Centre project, will be located at Murdoch University’s Centre for Comparative Genomics and will complement the $1 million iVEC infrastructure already housed at the Centre.
An energy-efficient 107 Teraflop system (1 Teraflop = One trillion floating point operations per second), the cluster uses HP ProLiant Blade servers with 9,600 cores and 500 terabytes of high performance storage. It will be part of iVEC's data network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.
For further information contact iVEC Media Officer, Brad Coleman on 08 6436 8920 or bradc@ivec.org
About iVEC:
iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO and the four public WA universities. iVEC fosters and promotes scientific and technological innovation through the provision of supercomputing and eResearch services to the research community, commercial organisations and government agencies. In 2009, iVEC was charged with establishing and operating the $80 million Pawsey Centre by the Australian government.
About the Pawsey Centre:
The Pawsey Centre (named after Dr Joseph Pawsey, an Australian pioneer in the field of radio astronomy) was officially launched by Senator Kim Carr, Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 27 August 2009. The Centre will be located adjoining CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in the Technology Park, Perth, Western Australia. As a supercomputing facility, it is expected to be amongst the top 20 supercomputers in the world at the time of its commissioning in 2013.