Sept. 12 — The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has installed the final stage upgrade of the supercomputer, ‘Magnus’, ushering in a new era of Australian research, powered by world-class technology.
The Pawsey Centre, which has been operating since November 2013, is an internationally significant supercomputing centre hosting the facilities and expertise to support Australia’s high-end scientific research.
It has been delivering practical research in a range of scientific disciplines using best practice computing technologies, while the building housing the systems is designed to minimise environmental impact and reduce energy use.
The upgrade has elevated the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre into the Petascale realm, with Magnus now able to deliver processing power in excess of a petaflop (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).
Magnus is the most advanced scientific supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, providing users with over 35,000 cores, using the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family (former codename Haswell) in Cray’s flagship XC30 system.
The latest members of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family deliver a combination of performance, built-in capabilities, and cost-effectiveness to address technical computing challenges, accelerate processor performance for peak loads, deliver intelligent storage or power data analytics. In comparison to previous generation processors there may be up to three times more performance1,2.
The upgrade will be a significant milestone in Australia’s scientific history, enabling supercomputing to take a pivotal role to support scientific endeavours that would have been impossible dreams only a decade ago.
“This upgrade will ensure the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre fulfils its mission to provide the best resources and services for researchers,” said Pawsey Supercomputing Centre Executive Director Dr. Neil Stringfellow.
“It will allow us to play a leading role in the delivery of scientific outcomes that improve the social and economic future of all Australians.”
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Source: iVEC