SGI Sets Up Supercomputer Based at Australia’s University of Tasmania

HP and IBM aren't the only companies building supercomputing clusters. SGI has also finished up work on a new installment that will allow the Australian University of Tasmania to research global climate, especially Antarctica's weather phenomena such as the Katabatic hurricane-speed winds, which gave the cluster its name. The system is known as the SGI Altix ICE cluster and its installation was recently completed by the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC).

“Katabatic supports vital, nationally important research for projects requiring state-of-the-art HPC capabilities, including in ocean, atmosphere, Antarctic ice sheet and climate modeling, computational chemistry and fluid dynamics,” said Dr. Nathan Bindoff, University of Tasmania professor and partnership director, and Nobel Laureate. “SGI Altix ICE supercomputers help our HPC facility maintain UTAS’ position as a leading center for marine and climate research in Australia.”

The Katabatic is made up of 512 processors set up in 64-cluster blade servers. The total random access memory amounts to one terabyte and the peak performance will reach as high as two teraflops, four times higher than the system it replaces. The mirror tape storage of the Sgi Altix is 524,288GB and complements the 71,680GB of hard drive space.

"SGI Altix ICE is a fundamental tool that will help the University of Tasmania advance its globally significant climate research,” stated Al Dei Maggi, vice president of sales for Japan and Asia Pacific at SGI. “Altix ICE will give its users tremendous compute performance and storage capacity to continue their important work.”

The cluster will be used by over 100 researchers from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center (ACE CRC), the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), the School of Chemistry, the School of Maths and Physics, and the Menzies Research Institute. To these come 30 TPAC users who will work on the supercomputer full-time.