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New Supercomputer Boosts Aussie SKA Telescope Bid

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-not-the-size-of-your-cluster-it's-how-you-use-it dept.

angry tapir writes "Australian academic supercomputing consortium iVEC has acquired another major supercomputer, Fornax, to be based at the University of Western Australia, to further the country's ability to conduct data-intensive research. The SGI GPU-based system, also known as iVEC@UWA, is made up of 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, 48 GB RAM and 7TB of storage. All up, the system has 1152 cores, 96 GPUs and an additional dedicated 500TB fabric attached storage-based global filesystem. The system is a boost to the Australian-NZ bid to host the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope."

6 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. And still... by Zaldarr · · Score: 2

    And still it can't run Crysis...

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    I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
    1. Re:And still... by Anubis350 · · Score: 2

      Not that the c2050's drivers are optimized for gaming, but it certainly has the grunt to play games, I've done it on the one in my tower right now :-p

      --
      "goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
  2. Re:So ... by crutchy · · Score: 3, Informative

    c'mon... we don't "put" anything on the barbie here. stuff is always chucked on :)
    i hope australia gets the ska. we have a factional space industry, but every bit extra helps

  3. Small fry by Axman6 · · Score: 2

    This machine is tiny compared to at least one other open supercomputer in Australia, the Vayu cluster at the National Computing Infrastructure's NAtional Facility in Canberra, which has a bit less than 12,000 cores, several petabytes of storage (tape and disk), and I believe some GPU's attached (the Xe system at the NCI NF has 16 Fermi cards).

    In the scheme of things, this probably won't help the bid much at all given its small size (and the truly astronomical amount of data the SKA will produce). But that said, it can't hurt. As someone who hopes to one day work on the compute infrastructure and systems show Australia get the SKA, I do hope very strongly that we do win the bid.

  4. Re:So ... by martin-boundary · · Score: 2

    D'you think there's room, with Ken on there already?...

  5. Km2? Not a lot for radio astronomy anymore. by niktemadur · · Score: 2

    Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.

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