Australia’s fastest supercomputer goes live

Australia’s fastest supercomputer has launched with the opening of the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) high-performance computing centre at ANU.

The NCI houses Raijin, a 1.2 Petaflop Fujitsu PRIMERGY cluster. The supercomputer includes 57,472 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge 2.6-GHz cores working in parallel, making it the largest x86 HPC installation in the Southern Hemisphere.

Raijin offers 160 TB of main memory and 10 PB of disk storage. It is capable of providing 503 million core hours of output per annum.

The NCI centre is being supported by a $50 million grant under the federal government’s Super Science Initiative. Partner organisations co-investing in the project include ANU, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia.

The partners plan to use Raijin for complicated research in areas including climate modelling, particle physics, microbiology and nanotechnology.

“Advanced computational methods form an increasingly essential component of high-impact research, in many cases underpinning discoveries that cannot be achieved by other means,” NCI director Professor Lindsay Botten said.

The Australian Research Council and other research-intensive Australian universities are also supporting the project.

The NCI has posted a time-lapse video of the Raijin supercomputer being built on its YouTube page.