Supercomputer bits

THE first major piece of physical hardware for what will become a world-leading supercomputer has been delivered to Murdoch University.

Looking a bit like a standard shipping container, iVEC’s new $5 million Performance Optimised Data Centre (POD) from Hewlett-Packard is anything but standard.

The POD’s 107 Teraflop system, with 9,600 cores and 500 terabytes of high performance storage, creates a ‘plug and play’ server cluster allowing the first phase of the $80 million Pawsey Centre project to be online by November.

iVEC, a joint venture between CSIRO and Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia, will build and operate the petascale supercomputing system from the purpose-built Pawsey Centre building alongside CSIRO headquarters at Technology Park in Bentley.

iVEC chairman Mal Bryce said about one third of the $80 million provided under the Commonwealth’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative would be spent on constructing the building (due for completion by Christmas 2011) with the remainder for the supercomputer.

“In 2010 and 2011 we’re spending a portion of the money on beefing up the capability of the nodes at the universities, to train the people and develop the expertise at running very fast supercomputers,” he said.

“Then the massive supercomputer that will be in the top 20 in the world will be assembled during 2012 and early 2013. In 2013, that’s when we’ll flip the switch.”

Mr Bryce emphasised that all those involved in the massive project “must learn to walk and jog before they learn to jog very fast”.

“And that’s exactly the phases we have to go through with learning to operate, and commissioning and acquiring computers of this order,” he said. “The one going in at Murdoch will be one of the most powerful computers in Australia but it is still dwarfed when compared to what the ultimate supercomputer will be.”