CSIRO to go CSIntelRO for supercomputer

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 17 February 2011 12:12

IT Industry - Tenders

Seeking to replace its existing SGI Altix supercomputer with a new model powered by 64-bit Intel processors, Australia's science organisation has gone to tender to double its supercomputing power.

Australia's Commonwealth Science and Research Organisation, the CSIRO has issued a tender over at the Australian Government's Tendering site seeking new supercomputing powers.

With technology moving so far, even supercomputers become less super over time, with what was once screamingly fast just getting slower and slower as time goes by and technology moves on.

Currently, the CSIRO uses an SGI Altix 4700 supercomputer with 'large memory (512Gbyte)',  but when you're Australia's primary science and research organisation, half a terabyte of memory is no longer enough.

What the CSIRO wants in its place is a 'system using x86 (ia32) compatible processors with 64-bit extension', and while this would presumably also mean AMD has a chance, Intel's processors appear to be the ones that will eventually win this deal and be in that big box of supercomputing tricks the CSIRO is seeking.

The organisation says the new supercomputer will, once delivered, 'provide processor and software compatibility with nearly all the other systems accessible by CSIRO users, but will uniquely provide a large-memory capability.

'The system will be used for data-intensive computing, and general shared-memory and other parallel computing', and says the CSIRO, 'it will interface to existing storage systems.'

In case there's any question over exactly how much performance the CSIRO is seeking, it explains that it 'At least double the capability of the Altix is desirable.'

Computerworld has some additional info on the makeup of the planned new supercomputer, should you wish to know more.