iVEC is celebrating the arrival of a massive server cluster in the form of a gigantic shipping container, which will ‘plug in’ to the Pawsey Centre and be online by November.

The Pawsey Centre is an $80 million project helping computational communities such as nanoscience, geosciences and also radioastronomy, making this a huge win for Australia’s Square Kilometre Array bid. It will be distributed amongst a series of supercomputing facilities, with a central location built in Kensington, adjacent to the Australian Resources Research Centre. The container server cluster will be located at Murdoch University’s Centre for Comparative Genomics.

The addition of the new server cluster will position WA well in its bid for the SKA. Image: Istockphoto

According to iVEC, the Performance Optimised Data Centre or POD from Hewlett Packard is an “an energy-efficient 107 Teraflop system, where 1 Teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second.”

The POD uses HP ProLiant Blade servers with 9,600 cores and 500 terabytes of high performance storage, plugging into iVEC's data network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.

For the lay person, iVEC chief executive officer Professor Andrew Rohl says the POD has “20 times more computing power than the three supercomputers that iVEC currently owns, combined”.

This computing power will also launch iVEC into the top 100 supercomputing hubs on the planet and make it possible to crunch gargantuan amounts of data.

While a variety of areas will benefit from this computing power, Prof Rohl says “...in terms of radio astronomy, good experimental data from telescopes also requires computational modelling to fully understand what the images are telling us."

“This Stage 1A system will allow large scale simulations of things like galaxy formation that will be undertaken at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

“It will also be used to develop the software for ASKAP which requires about the same amount of compute power as this entire system and when operational will require this capacity 24/7.

“Thus they can use this system to test their software up to the full ASKAP system prior to operation.

“Once it’s operational, they will require access to the petascale computer that will be purchased in 2012.”

Prof Rohl also says in three years’ time, Western Australia will end up with the largest supercomputing resource in the world that has such a large portion of its resources dedicated to radio astronomy. This will ensure that Australia is SKA-ready from a supercomputing perspective.

iVEC’s supercomputing system boost is part of the Commonwealth government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative.

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