[LINK] new SA supercomputer for national grid etc

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Cluster gives SA new grunt
Karen Dearne JANUARY 12, 2007
http://australianit.news.com.au

SOUTH Australian researchers are boasting a new supercomputer - a quad-
core cluster capable of delivering 6 TeraFLOPS performance, a massive six 
billion calculations per second.

The SGI Altix XE1300 has been bought by the South Australian Partnership 
for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) to replace "Perseus", the oldest of its 
four existing supercomputers. 

The new machine has been dubbed Corvus, the crow, in line with the 
tradition of naming cluster-based supercomputers after stellar 
constellations. 

SAPAC director Professor Tony Williams says Corvus will be the nation's 
fourth fastest computer, "and, for dedicated R&D, second only to the 
Australian National Facility" in Canberra. 

"It will be used to tackle some of the most demanding scientific and 
technical problems including bioinformatics, water resource and 
environmental management, oceanography, computational chemistry and the 
analysis of synchrotron data," Prof Williams said. 

"It will also become part of the evolving national grid - a network of 
high-performance computers, data repositories, scientific instruments and 
the software and services that allow these to interoperate." 

SAPAC has also purchased associated data management equipment including 
an SGI 8.4 Terabyte RAID storage array, an archival tape library and 
fibre channel switch. 

Prof Williams said the infrastructure would underpin the Sustainable 
Repository that SAPAC was building to maintain the state's growing 
research data collections. 

Corvus will be installed and implemented during March.

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