Melbourne University to house fourth most powerful supercomputer in world

Stan Beer
Thursday, 19 June 2008 18:13

Your IT - Home IT

A 400Tflop supercomputer costing $100 million is going to be built at the University of Melbourne in a facility devoted to life sciences and, with that performance, it would rank number four on the Top500 supercomputer list as it stands today. The Victorian state government has guaranteed to put up $50 million for the project, making it a sure bet that the major supercomputer vendors will be bidding for the business.

With a performance of 400Tflops (400 trillion floating point operations per second), the yet to be built supercomputer would rank number four on the Top500 List, behind the IBM Roadrunner (1026Tflops), IBM BlueGene/L (478.2Tflops) and IBM BlueGene/P (450.3Tflops), all of which are housed in the US by the Department of Energy. However, the Australian supercomputer would be significantly more powerful than the currently fourth ranked Sun Microsoystems Ranger (326Tflops) and almost twice as powerful as the fifth ranked Cray Jaguar (205Tflops), which are also housed in the US.

"As part of the initiative, the University of Melbourne will develop a Life Sciences Computation Centre to undertake the peak computing operations and provide computational biology expertise to the institutions throughout the Melbourne Parkville Precinct," said Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne.

The University of Melbourne intends to call for expressions of interest for the Life Sciences Computation Centre and peak computing facility (PCF) in 2008, with the major PCF installations planned for 2009 and 2011.

With demonstrable expertise at building "big iron" computers and an already large presence in Australia, IBM would appear to be the front runner to get the business of building the massive new number cruncher. However, companies that could also lay claim to having the credentials to build the new computer include Hewlett-Packard, Cray, SGI and Hitachi, all of which have powerful supercomputer installations in the upper echelons of the Top500.

The latest supercomputer to hit the headlines is the IBM Roadrunner, the first computer to break the 1 Petaflop (1000Tflops) barrier. The IBM Roadrunner uses a combination of 12,960 nine-core Cell processors, the chip that powers the PlayStation 3 games console, and 6948 AMD Opteron dual-core CPUs.

However, there has been no word as to what architecture will be employed for the new Australian computer - just academics waxing lyrical about the benfits it will bring to the local scientific and medical communities.

"Life sciences research is being transformed by the application of rapid advances in computational biology, powered by innovations in very high performance computers and data management, "said Professor James Angus, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

"This will lead to major improvements in public health outcomes - particularly in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disease, chronic inflammatory diseases, bone diseases and diabetes."

While the benefits for scientific research are obvious, there will also be plenty of interest about the hardware, software and the vendors involved with bringing what will surely be one of the most exciting IT projects to life over the next three years.