Australia's fastest Linux computer makes CSIRO a leader

David Heath
Tuesday, 01 June 2010 23:20

Business IT - Technology

Updated: Hot on the heels of yesterday's Top500 supercomputer announcement comes a reminder that Australia is a significant player in the field with the only NVidia CUDA research centre in the southern hemisphere.

We reported yesterday that Australia held position 112 in the current list of the world's top 500 supercomputers with a computer running both Linux and Windows for a variety of applications.

Announced at the current International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, another supercomputer, installed at the Australian National University also by Xenon Systems, became part of NVidia's world-wide network of high performance computing research centres.  According to CSIRO's information this GPU research machine is capable of 256 Tflop/s single-point precision (which would not gain entry in the double-point derived Top500 list).

Over the past few years, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become increasingly targeted for their ability to conduct intensive arithmetic tasks and NVidia's CUDA system is at the forefront of such systems.

CSIRO's Group Executive, Information Sciences, Dr Alex Zelinsky, said the announcement furthers CSIRO's goal of being a world leader in the application of GPU technology to a broad range of scientific and industrial problems.

"To be involved in NVidia's CUDA Research Centre Program, which is designed for institutions that embrace GPU computing across multiple research fields, is a great honour for CSIRO," Dr Zelinsky said.

"We're excited to be in such good company. CUDA Research Centres include Johns Hopkins University (US) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)."

NVIDIA's Director of Research, Dr David Luebke, said the CUDA Research Centre program is designed to recognise and encourage the use of GPUs for scientific and high performance computing.

"CSIRO will gain access to the latest developments in GPU computing and become part of a wider community of organisations with GPU facilities, sharing information and ideas," Dr Luebke said.

 

The local Linux afficionados would surely take lives to get a chance to play with such a machine!

 

Note - the original version of this article confused the new GPU supercomputer with the ANU/BoM machine placed at 112 in the Top500 list; they are not the same machine.