New supercomputer has the power of 56,000 computers

Australia’s most powerful computer Raijin, named after the Japanese god of thunder, lightning and storms, can perform the same number of calculations in one hour that would take seven billion people armed with calculators 20 years.

The computer was officially launched at the opening of the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) high-performance computing centre at The Australian National University (ANU).

With peak performance speeds of 1.2 petaflops - 1,200,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second - the new computer has the power of 56,000 computers working in parallel, and the disk storage equivalent of 20,000 computers but working much faster. It can perform the same number of calculations in one hour that every one of the 7 billion humans on Earth, armed with calculators, could perform in 20 years - or 170,000 calculations per second, per person on Earth.

The Fujitsu Primergy, Raijin, will to enable researchers to process vast volumes of data that would otherwise take years to complete and simply not be possible using desktop computers. It will be available to users in a phased approach starting early next week.

“Advanced computational methods form an increasingly essential component of high-impact research, in many cases underpinning discoveries that cannot be achieved by other means, as well as underpinning the platform with which to sustain innovation at an internationally competitive level,” said Professor Lindsay Botten, Director of the NCI.

Raijin is a high-performance cluster with 57,472 cores (Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge 2.6 GHz), Mellanox FDR interconnect, 160 TB of main memory and 10 PB of useable fast filesystem, running the OneSIS cluster manager and the PBS Pro workflow manager.

The computer’s speed enables researchers to run complex models. They might, for example, seek to understand the forces that bind the building blocks of our universe, to ‘supercharge’ the photosynthesis of virtual crops or to understand the dynamics of the world’s oceans and their impact on the climate.

The operation of the NCI is sustained through co-investment by a number of partner organisations including ANU, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and other research-intensive universities supported by the Australian Research Council, the total of which amounts to a further $50 million over four years.