ITWire

NCI facilities combine a new data centre, which is due for completion next month, and the Fujitsu supercomputer, due to be fully operational by January next year.

Phil McCormack, Head of Strategy of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand said Brocade had been selected as a partner for the management network of the new NCI Supercomputer at ANU, as the company’s switching capability was “proven in similar global HPC environments and its pricing configuration represented value that was well ahead of other offerings in the market.”

“It was crucial that we selected a partner that not only had experience in high-performance computing, but one that was already capable of providing cost-effective, high-density solutions for both the data centre and supercomputer.”

McCormack said that to support the organisation’s operations, the NCI Supercomputer must be reliably networked to servers and numerous management devices, which was “the key to the inclusion of Brocade Ethernet switches as part of Fujitsu’s turnkey solution.”

Fujitsu will deploy Brocade FastIron SX Series switches as the high-availability, low-latency core of the data centre management network with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) fibre connections to the Fujitsu supercomputer and supporting servers. The configuration also features 1 GbE connections to more than 100 Brocade FastIron WS Series switches that provide network access to a wide range of system management and monitoring devices.

Graham Schultz, Regional Director Australia and New Zealand, Brocade. said that with Brocade now part of Australia’s high-performance computing future, “researchers at the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, ANU and other universities can be assured of dependable access to Fujitsu’s solution for high-end computational services to the Australian research community.”

NCI facilities combine a new data centre, which is due for completion in October 2012, and the Fujitsu supercomputer, due to be fully operational by January 2013.