The National Computation Infrastructure (NCI) has just completed the first phase of a $40 million upgrade to its supercomputing facility.
The upgrade adds 1440 Intel Sapphire Rapids processors, now available to researchers, with enhanced electrical supply laying the groundwork for future growth.
NCI says it’s one of the world’s first HPC facilities to deploy the new XEON processors, which will provide 600 million hours annually of computing for local researchers.
“The system will speed up research tasks and provide users with more access than ever before to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country”, NCI said in a statement.
The upgrade means Gadi now has more than 250,000 processor cores, giving it performance of more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second, with 100,000TB of high performance research data storage.
The new system’s full spec is 78,000 CPU cores in its 1440 52-core Sapphire Rapid Xeon processors, 720 compute nodes, 369TB of memory, and an NVIDIA 200 Gbps Infiniband interconnect. The new system is fully integrated with the rest of Gadi.
The new system is also more energy efficient than previous systems, with “direct liquid cooling of both the processors and the power supplies covering the bulk of the system’s cooling needs.”
The Department of Education’s co-funded the project through its national collaborative research infrastructure strategy (NCRIS), and by the NCI Collaboration.
That collaboration comprises CSIRO, the Australian National University, the Bureau of Meteorology and the University of New South Wales, along with 35 other universities and medical research institutes.
