ANU selects Fujitsu to supply NCI supercomputer

Fujitsu has announced, today, that it has been selected to supply a high-performance supercomputer to the Australian National University (ANU), to be installed within the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), provider of high-end capability computational services to the Australian research community.

“The new supercomputer will provide Australia with a much needed capability to meet national challenges. It will take Australia’s research to new levels in areas such as weather and climate modelling, computational chemistry, particle physics, astronomy, material science, microbiology, nanotechnology and photonics,” said ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young, commenting on the role of the supercomputer.

The largest X-86 HPC installation of any brand in the Southern Hemisphere and the largest PRIMERGY deployment worldwide, the X-86 cluster, using Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, ANU supercomputer has a theoretical performance of 1.2 PetaFlops (1,200,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) and 12 Petabytes storage capacity - the power of 56,000 computers working in parallel with disk storage equivalent to 20,000 computers, but working much faster.

“Once completed, the NCI supercomputer will be one of the largest and fastest computers in the world,” said Fujitsu ANZ CEO Mike Foster.

The project will also see the implementation of Fujitsu’s PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which improves upon Fujitsu’s supercomputer technology employed in the world’s fastest supercomputer, the K Computer. Fujitsu elected to bid its Fujitsu PRIMERGY X-86 High Performance Computing (HPC) technology in order to meet the ANU’s stringent performance, efficiency and benchmarking requirements and to support the continued use of software codes developed for the X-86 platform.

The innovative HPC design is based on commodity hardware, designed to deliver improved price/performance, access to a greater range of ISV applications and simplify the migration process of existing X-86 applications.

The installation will be undertaken by Fujitsu’s combined supercomputing expertise from Australia and Japan with support from Fujitsu Australia engineering teams and subcontract partners. The Fujitsu project partners are: APC power and cooling, Brocade and Xenon/Mellanox InfiniBand switching, Data Direct Networks high-speed storage and Intel chipsets.

As part of the contract, Fujitsu will also collaborate with the ANU in a number of research areas related to shared strategic objectives.

ANU receives funding for NCI under the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science, Research and Tertiary Education under its Super Science Initiative. NCI is also supported by a partnership involving the CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and the ANU. Researcher access to NCI facilities and services is also supported by the ARC and a number of Australia’s research intensive universities.

NCI facilities combine a new data centre, which is due for completion in September 2012, and the Fujitsu supercomputer, due to be fully operational by January 2013.