NCI gets $14m to upgrade supercomputer capacity

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has secured $14 million to improve its supercomputing capacity by 30%.

The government has committed $7 million for the project, and this will be matched dollar for dollar by the NCI’s collaborating partners.

NCI provides supercomputing services to more than 4000 researchers in more than 80% of Australian universities, as well as government science agencies, medical research institutes and industry.

The $7 million funding injection forms part of the $16 million committed to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Agility Fund, announced yesterday by the Ministry of Education and Training.

NCI associate director Allan Williams said the expansion will add an extra 150 million compute hours per year to the NCI’s current supercomputer, Raijin.

Raijin has a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops and a capability of more than 500 million compute hours per year. But researcher demand is currently outstripping the system’s capacity to supply.

“Researchers will not only see a 30% boost in supercomputer throughput, but will have access to cutting-edge technology and will benefit from a 10% increase in overall storage capability, growing by 3 petabytes with the replacement of the earliest Lustre file system, which was the fastest in the Southern Hemisphere at the time it was commissioned,” Williams said.

The new storage capacity will be augmented by the NCI’s InfiniBan interconnect, which links high-performance computing and storage systems together at speeds of 50–120 GBps.