Nov. 25, 2019 — The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has selected Dell Technologies to expand its current cloud system with five times more memory and 25 times more storage to form a new cutting-edge system.

The new compute cloud is another piece of the puzzle that will make up the $70m capital refresh project for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to accelerate Australia’s rate of scientific discovery.

This new platform will enable researchers to process and analyze large amounts of data through additional object storage and the Kubernetes container orchestrator and builds on Pawsey’s existing container technology for its supercomputing and cloud systems.

Australia is entering an age of new scientific study where bioinformatics and space science, for example, are generating large datasets. This new compute cloud will support those emerging domains with its high-performance storage and data throughput.

Mark Gray, Pawsey’s Acting Head of Data, says the new system will help scientists by providing flexibility, accessibility and speed.

“You can cluster containers, maybe you need to spin up 10 machines, to database services, a web server, five computational nodes, and get them all talking to each other and other HPC facilities at Pawsey,” he said.

“With this expansion, you will be able to do it, and automate it – this is a system where researchers can run their applications wherever they want and whenever they need.”

The new system, built on industry leading Dell EMC Power Edge servers, features 58 compute nodes utilizing 2nd Generation AMD EPYC supporting up to 14,800 virtual cores, 9 petabytes of Ceph storage, 58 terabytes of RAM (up to 8GB per core) and 100 GB ethernet networking.

“In advancing human progress researchers are often only limited by advances in technology,” said Andrew Underwood, field chief technology officer, HPC and Artificial Intelligence, Dell Technologies, Asia Pacific and Japan. “We have created a technology solution that will deliver significantly higher computing power, in a flexible and modular design, allowing researchers at Pawsey to push the limits of compute and data-intensive research workloads and delivery of faster research breakthroughs.”

Pawsey will call for researcher applications to test the new system during the first quarter 2020 to provide feedback and help evaluate the performance of the new system.

About Pawsey

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. It is supported by the Western Australian and Federal Governments. The Centre is one of two, Tier-1, High Performance Computing facilities in Australia, whose primary function is to accelerate scientific research for the benefit of the nation.

Source: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre