Supercomputer To Take On Google
One of the country’s fastest supercomputers will take up residence at WA’s Murdoch University later this year.
The $5 million Hewlett Packard supercomputer will be housed in its own temperature-controlled “Performance Optimised Datacentre”, a unit that looks similar to a shipping container from the outside, when it arrives at the university in October.
It is made up of a staggering 9600 central processing units and the machine will rival the cutting-edge machines used by internet giants such as Google.
It will be built in Sydney and the POD transported from Scotland, before the machine is brought to Perth to support the state’s $80 million Pawsey Centre, which was established last year to host high performance computing facilities and Square Kilometre Array research.
It is similar to supercomputers used by technology giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
When complete in 2013, the centre will rival the 20 best computers in the world and will allow Western Australia’s bid to be among a global network of Square Kilometre Array radio telescopes that will shed light on the birth and eventual death of the cosmos.
Murdoch University’s Director of the Centre for Comparative Genomics, Professor Matthew Bellgard, said the machine would be connected via a 10 gigabits-per-second network, have 500 terabytes of storage and have its own energy-efficient cooling system.
“The new supercomputer makes a quantum leap in terms of the speed at which researchers will be able to process data,” Professor Bellgard said.
It will be used to analyse data from scientists across the country working on radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and life science projects.
“It’s really to support the increases in high-end scientific research from all areas that generate very large amounts of data,” Professor Bellgard said.
The supercomputer will be connected to the iVEC network, which consists of the CSIRO, Curtin University of Technology, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia.