It looks like something you find rusting in a railway siding but open the doors and you have the supercomputer’s answer to the Tardis. iVEC, a joint venture between four Western Australia Universities and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO as it is known has bought itself an HP POD, or ‘Performance Optimized Data Centre’. The idea of putting pre-configured data centers in 20-foot long shipping containers will launch iVEC into the top 100 supercomputing centers on the world.
iVEC is a bit light on the specifications but says the POD is an “energy-efficient 107 Teraflop” cluster, incorporating 1,600 HP ProLiant Blade servers, all Xeon 5600s, 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.
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, having a major boost to the resources available to the radio astronomy, nanoscience, geosciences and other leading computational communities.
The $80M Pawsey Center project will live at Murdoch University’s Center for Comparative Genomics and will complement the $1 million iVEC infrastructure which is in turn part of Australia’s $1.1bn Super Science Initiative.
When fully commissioned in 2013 the Pawsey Centre is expected to be one of the world’s top 20 supercomputers, according to iVEC.
The Pawsey Centre was officially launched by Senator Kim Carr, Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on August 2009. The Centre will be located adjoining CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in the Technology Park, Perth, Western Australia.
iVEC says the HP purchase is the “first step to creating a world-leading supercomputing architecture to enhance Australia and New Zealand’s bid to host the Square Kilometer Array” (SKA), a $1.5bn radio telescope which will require massive compute power and dry places with minimal radio frequency pollution. An international consortium of governments and funding agencies will announce the winner in 2012.
