[LINK] Vayu .. new Aussie supercomputer

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot

November 16th, 2009 http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/


To the envy of geeks everywhere Australia's most powerful computer has 
been officially launched in Canberra, ushering in a new era for 
scientific research.

The supercomputer, jointly funded by the Australian National University, 
the CSIRO and the federal government, was officially launched by Science 
Minister Kim Carr at its new home today.

The supercomputer will be operated by National Computational 
Infrastructure and director Lindsay Botten says the computer brings 
Australia's capability into line with the top systems around the world.

"This next generation research supercomputer will boost Australia's 
computational research capacity into world ranking," Professoressor 
Botten said.

It will provide 12 times the performance of its predecessor, placing it 
within the world's top 30-40 supercomputers.

The new computer, known as the Vayu, is a Sun Microsystems Constellation 
class supercomputer and is due to be up and running at full capacity in 
December.

The Vayu, replacing the four-year-old and now obsolete SGI Altix 3700, is 
not your average desktop PC and has some impressive specs to go with its 
multi-million dollar price tag.

"The Vayu contains 11,936 processing cores, so you can think of that as 
roughly 6000 home PCs but a good deal more elaborate," said Professor 
Botten.

"There is 36 terabytes (one terabyte — 1000 gigabytes) of memory (RAM), 
that's roughly equivalent to 18,000 home PCs," he said.

"The storage system is around 500-600 terabytes once formatted, but is 
more like a petabyte (one petabyte — 1000 terabytes) in its raw state, so 
you might see that as around 4000 home PC hard drives."

Professor Botten says that means the Vayu is capable of operating at 140 
teraflops, which relates to the speed at which it makes so-
called "floating point" calculations.

This is a 10-fold increase on the Altix, which could only manage 14.

"That's 140 trillion multiplications every second," he said.

"So to put that in context, imagine 20,000 calculations per second for 
every man, woman and child on the planet.

"Or if you sat those six billion people down, gave them each a calculator 
and asked them to do a calculation that lasted seven years, this machine 
could do that in one day."

All those flops certainly require a lot of power with the Vayu sucking 
more than 600 kilowatts of power every moment it's switched on.

That's roughly equivalent to 140 electric ovens running permanently, 
though Professor Botten says all power for the hungry machine will be 
sourced from green energy.

The CSIRO and the ANU each paid more than $3 million, for which they get 
about a quarter of the machine.

In keeping with the green theme, one of the Vayu's main uses will be 
helping to model climate change.

"About 70 per cent of the work CSIRO have on their share will be in 
climate science," Professor Botten said.

"The ANU will use its share across a wide variety of fields, a lot of 
physics, a lot of chemistry, a lot of computational biology and 
astronomy."

Alex Zelinsky, group executive of information sciences at the CSIRO, says 
the new computer will help Australian climate science to the top levels 
of international research.

"The new facility will strengthen Australia's capacity to understand and 
respond to changes in the global climate system, as well as showcase the 
strength of Australia's top scientific research institutions," he said.

While the Vayu's specs may seem impressive, Professor Botten is already 
eying its replacement in 2011-12 and expects it to be about 12 times as 
powerful again, more than 280 trillion calculations per second.

That's a lot of Facebook. AAP
--

Cheers,
Stephen