Swinburne snags a supercomputer

Dr Jarrod Hurley, Swinburne's supercomputer manager, said the university was committed to maintaining its position as a leader in academic supercomputing, during providing HPC facilities to meet the technology needs of staff and students.

"The combined theoretical performance of gSTAR is in excess of 130 TFLOPS, which is ten times more powerful than the Green Machine," Hurley said. "The computing power provided by GPUs will open up new avenues for cutting-edge simulations and rapid processing of telescope data".

Hurley said the first phase of the project will as well deliver over 1 Petabyte or 1.8 million Gigabytes of rapid-access usable disk space to Swinburne researchers, a massive increase over existing resources.

Number of memory nodes available

There will as well be a number of memory nodes available, each with 512 Gigabytes of memory, to facilitate processing and visualisation of large datasets, all interconnected by a QDR infiniband network that gives nodes up to 40 Gigabytes of throughput - over 10,000 times faster than a typical Australian broadband connection.

Procurement of the HPC facility is a joint effort between the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne Innovation and Information Research Services, with input from the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing and external astronomers.

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