Fujitsu to upgrade Australia's fastest supercomputer

Australia’s fastest supercomputer is set to receive a 10-fold speed increase as part of an upgrade commissioned by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).

The upgrade — to be carried out by Fujitsu Australia Limited — will see the NCI’s current supercomputer, Raijin, replaced with a new machine, called Gadi, which will contain 3200 nodes to provide higher speeds and capacity than the existing supercomputer.

It will be used by researchers from the CSIRO, Geosciences Australia and the Bureau of Meteorology to “solve some of the most complex and pressing challenges facing the world currently” and housed at the Australian National University from November this year, according to Fujitsu.

The Australian National University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, is excited about the new supercomputer.

“This new machine will keep Australian research and the 5000 researchers who use it at the cutting edge. It will help us get smarter with our big data. It will add even more brawn to the considerable brains already tapping into NCI.”

The supercomputer will be equipped with Fujitsu and Lenovo Neptune direct liquid cooling technologies with warm water, allowing for high-density computing; Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX2570 M5 servers; second-generation Intel Xeon Platinum Processors; Intel Optane DC persistent memory; and NVIDIA 100 GPUs to accelerate deep learning training and interfacing.

It will also have NetApp enterprise-class storage arrays, clustered together in a DDN Lustre parallel file system delivering terabyte scale data transfer speeds. The inter-connect network is architected using Mellanox’s latest generation HDR InfiniBand technology in a Dragonfly+ topology, capable of transferring data at 200 Gbps. Altair’s PBS Works Suite software will optimise job scheduling and workload management.

Image credit: © stock.adobe.com/au/vladimircaribb