13 November 2012

Australia's most powerful supercomputer at ANU

| johnboy
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The Australian National University is celebrating their new big iron sweeping to the top of the Australian charts:

The National Computational Infrastructure’s new Fujitsu Primergy Supercomputer has debuted at number one in Australia, and number 24 in the world on the TOP500 list of best supercomputers, released overnight.

The result, announced at SC12, an annual Supercomputing Conference held in Salt Lake City, confirms that the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is home to the most powerful computer system available to researchers in Australia.

Installed at The Australian National University, the supercomputer has been funded by the Australian Government under its Super Science Initiative to advance Australian computational research and, in particular, climate change, earth system science and national water management.

The supercomputer has approximately 57,500 cores, 160 TBytes of main memory, and 12 PBytes of disk – comparable in scale to about 30,000 desktop computers working together in parallel – and capable of achieving an internationally competitive peak performance of 1,200 TFlops.

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astrojax said :

i’ll bet the f***er still crashes when it tries to run excel… do they then jujst turn it off and back on again?

Nah, it’s a supercomputer. That means it can turn itself off and back on again.

switch said :

LSWCHP said :

Things just ain’t been the same round here since the days of the Control Data Cyber 205 at CSIRO. Now *that* was a computer.

Well, it was a vast improvement on the 7600. No wonder every Division got a VAX. Nothing sucked like a VAX…

Yeah, the VAXen were always a bit lame. Real DECheads programmed on the beautiful DECSystem-10 and would accept no substitutes. Oh, the sweet, sweet orthogonality of that instruction set….sorry…getting a bit misty-eyed here. 🙂

LSWCHP said :

Things just ain’t been the same round here since the days of the Control Data Cyber 205 at CSIRO. Now *that* was a computer.

Well, it was a vast improvement on the 7600. No wonder every Division got a VAX. Nothing sucked like a VAX…

i’ll bet the f***er still crashes when it tries to run excel… do they then jujst turn it off and back on again?

Grrrr said :

What a beast!

Is it too nerdy of me to be a little sad about the replacement of real Mainframes in the Top500 with x86 (plus a couple of SPARC/Power) Clusters?

No it’s not, and I feel your pain. Things just ain’t been the same round here since the days of the Control Data Cyber 205 at CSIRO. Now *that* was a computer.

My definition of hell: ‘an annual Supercomputing Conference held in Salt Lake City.’

Sorry, I’ll go away now and leave this thread to people who can say TFlops without giggling.

What a beast!

Is it too nerdy of me to be a little sad about the replacement of real Mainframes in the Top500 with x86 (plus a couple of SPARC/Power) Clusters?

1,200 TFlops….wow

I can remember when I rode into town in 79, that the bloke who ran our footy tipping comp used to plug into the big beast at CSIRO..
On a Monday the engineers who were working on stress figures for aeroplane landing strips and what have you, were told to take a hike as the crunching of the footy tip figures were more important.

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