National Computational Infrastructure

Last updated

The National Computational Infrastructure building at the Australian National University in 2013 North face of the National Computational Infrastructure building July 2013.jpg
The National Computational Infrastructure building at the Australian National University in 2013

The National Computational Infrastructure (also known as NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research-intensive universities and medical research institutes.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Access to computational resources is provided to funding partners as well as researchers awarded grants under the National Computing Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS). [1] [2]

The current director is Sean Smith. [3] [4]

Notable staff

Facility

The NCI building is located on the ANU campus in Canberra and uses hot aisle containment and free cooling to cool their computers. [2]

Computer systems

As of June 2020, NCI operates two main high-performance computing installations, including:

Data services and storage

NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.

Datasets

NCI hosts multiple data sets that can be used on their computation systems including:

Research

Research conducted or underway includes: [11]

History

NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001.

In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration.

The table below provides comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.

System specificationsPerformanceYears activeInitial
Top500
Rank
NameProcessorMemoryStoragePeakSustained
(SPEC)		IntroducedRetired
Fujitsu VP100 Vector 64 MB0.15 GFLOPS19871992—
Fujitsu VP2200 Vector 512 MB27 GB1.25 GFLOPS19921996—
Fujitsu VPP Vector/Scalar 14 GB28 GFLOPS1996200159
SGI Power Challenge XL20
MIPS R10000 		2 GB77 GB6.4 GFLOPS—
Compaq/HP Alphaserver
(sc)		512
DEC Alpha 		0.5 TB12 TB1 TFLOPS2,0002001200531
SGI Altix 3700 [5]
(ac)		1,920
Intel Itanium 		5.5 TB100 TB14 TFLOPS21,0002005200926
SGI Altix XE
(xe)		1,248
Intel Xeon
(Nehalem)		2.5 TB90 TB14 TFLOPS12,00020092013—
Sun/Oracle Constellation (Vayu) [5] 11,936
Intel Xeon
(Nehalem)		37 TB800 TB140 TFLOPS240,0002009201335
Fujitsu Primergy (Raijin) [9] 57,472
Intel Xeon
(Sandy Bridge)		160 TB12.5 PB1.195 PFLOPS1,600,0002013201924
Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 (Gadi) [4] 145,152
Intel Xeon
(Cascade Lake)		576 TB20 PB9.26 PFLOPS2020In use24

Vayu

The Vayu computer cluster, the predecessor of Raijin, was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a Hindu god, the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.

Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one-eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010. Vayu had the following performance characteristics: [12]

The system comprised: [13]

The power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system was approx 605 kW, but all the power was intended to be from green energy sources. [14]

System software for the Vayu cluster includes: [13]

The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the center and installation of Vayu. [15] Other participating organizations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine. [14] The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government, made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful. [14] [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Diego Supercomputer Center</span> Supercomputer at UC San Diego.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego. SDSC is located at the UC San Diego campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure. The current SDSC director is Frank Würthwein, Ph.D., UC San Diego physics professor and a founding faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute of UC San Diego, who succeeded Michael L. Norman, also a Physics professor from UC San Diego Department, and who was the SDSC director since September 2010. Frank Würthwein assumed the role of SDSC director in July 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forschungszentrum Jülich</span> Interdisciplinary research centre in Germany

Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is a German national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates a broad range of research infrastructures like supercomputers, an atmospheric simulation chamber, electron microscopes, a particle accelerator, cleanrooms for nanotechnology, among other things. Current research priorities include the structural change in the Rhineland lignite-mining region, hydrogen, and quantum technologies. As a member of the Helmholtz Association with roughly 6,800 employees in ten institutes and 80 subinstitutes, Jülich is one of the largest research institutions in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Columbia (supercomputer)</span> NASA Supercomputer

Columbia was a supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics (SGI) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), installed in 2004 at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility located at Moffett Field in California. Named in honor of the crew who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, it increased NASA's supercomputing capacity ten-fold for the agency's science, aeronautics and exploration programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MareNostrum</span> Supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division</span> Provides computing resources for various NASA projects

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TeraGrid</span>

TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a high performance computing and networking center founded in 1986 and one of the original five NSF Supercomputing Centers. PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high-performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development, and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center</span> Supercomputer facility operated by the US Department of Energy in Berkeley, California

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) National User Facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research in energy efficiency, storage, and generation; Earth systems science, and understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the universe. The largest research areas are in High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Perlmutter, which debuted in 2021 ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers.

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) was an Australian organisation established in 1998 to provide advanced computing and grid infrastructure for Australian research communities. APAC was established under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative objective of the Australian Government's Backing Australia's Ability innovation plan. The Australian National University was the host institution for APAC.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaguar (supercomputer)</span> Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Computer Center for Higher Education (France)</span>

The National Computer Center for Higher Education, based in Montpellier, is a public institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) created by a decree issued in 1999. CINES offers IT services for public research in France. It is one of the major national centers for computing power supply for research in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yellowstone (supercomputer)</span>

Yellowstone was the inaugural supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was installed, tested, and readied for production in the summer of 2012. The Yellowstone supercomputing cluster was decommissioned on December 31, 2017, being replaced by its successor Cheyenne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Pakistan</span> Overview of supercomputing in Pakistan

The high performance supercomputing program started in mid-to-late 1980s in Pakistan. Supercomputing is a recent area of Computer science in which Pakistan has made progress, driven in part by the growth of the information technology age in the country. Developing on the ingenious supercomputer program started in 1980s when the deployment of the Cray supercomputers was initially denied.

iVEC is the government-supported high-performance computing national facility located in Perth, Western Australia. iVEC supported researchers in Western Australia and across Australia through the Pawsey Centre and resources across the partner facilities. iVEC was rebranded to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in December 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center</span> High performance computing center in Wyoming, US

The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (PSC) is the government-supported high-performance computing national facility located in Perth, Western Australia. Pawsey supports researchers in Western Australia and across Australia through the Pawsey Centre (facility).

The Cheyenne supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming operated for seven years as one of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computers from 2017 to 2024. Ranked in November 2016 as the 20th most powerful computer in the world and November 2023 as 160th by Top500, the 5.34-petaflops system is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing performed by NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient than Yellowstone, with a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.

References

  1. ↑ Iriarte, Mariana. "Calls for Supercomputing Time in Pawsey's Magnus Are Now Open". HPCwire. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
  2. 1 2 "Byte me: An inside look at Australia's supercomputer". ABC News. 9 July 2017. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 "NCI supercomputing facility names new director". Computerworld. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 "ANU supercomputer to answer big questions". The Canberra Times. 4 August 2019. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 "Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot". The Age. 16 November 2009. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
  6. ↑ "Gadi, Australia's new supercomputer, ranks 25th most powerful in the world". ABC News. 22 June 2020. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
  7. ↑ Turner, Murray. "UC Library Guides: Statistics: Key Resources: Australian Statistics". canberra.libguides.com. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  8. 1 2 "HPC – Astronomy Australia Limited" . Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Jingbo Wang; Evans, Ben; Bastrakova, Irina; Kemp, Carina; Fraswer, Ryan; Wyborn, Lesley (2015). "Bringing Australian Geophysical Data onto a High Performance Data Node at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)". doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.16377.06240.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. ↑ Geoscience Australia (17 July 2017). "The data behind the search for MH370: Phase One data released". www.ga.gov.au. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  11. ↑ "Research Highlights - National Computational Infrastructure". National Computational Infrastructure. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
  12. ↑ Current Peak System, nci.org.au, accessed 2009-11-17
  13. 1 2 Sun Constellation cluster, vayu: System Details, nci.org.au, accessed 2010-03-18
  14. 1 2 3 Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot, The Age, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
  15. 1 2 ANU National Computational Infrastructure National Facility (speech), Senator Kim Carr, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.