National Computational Infrastructure

The National Computational Infrastructure (also known as NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, The Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research intensive universities and medical research institutes.

The National Computational Infrastructure building at the Australian National University in 2013

The current director is Professor Sean Smith.

Computer systems

As of June 2020, NCI operates two main high-performance computing installations, including:

  • Gadi, a 9.26 PetaFLOP high-performance distributed memory cluster consisting of:
    • 145,152 cores (Intel Xeon Scalable 'Cascade Lake' processors) across 3024 nodes
    • 160 nodes containing four Nvidia V100 GPUs
    • 567 Terabytes of main memory
    • 20 Petabytes of fast storage
    • 47 Petabytes of storage for large data files
    • 50 Petabytes of tape storage for archival
    • HDR Mellanox Infiniband in Dragonfly+ topology (up to 200Gbit/s transfer)
  • Tenjin, a 67 TeraFLOP bespoke high-performance partner cloud, consisting of:
    • 1600 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge cores
    • 25 Terabytes main memory
    • 160 Terabytes State Disk

Data services and storage

NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.

Research

Research conducted or under way includes:[1]

History

NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001.

In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration.

The below table is a comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.

System (name) Processor Memory Storage Peak Perf. Sustained Perf. (SPEC) Initial

Top500

Rank

1987–92

Fujitsu VP100

 Vector 64 MByte 0.15 GFlops
1992–96

Fujitsu VP2200

 Vector 512 MByte 27 GByte 1.25 GFlops
1996–2001

Fujitsu VPP

 Vector/

Scalar

 14 GByte 28 GFlops 59
SGI Power Challenge XL 20

MIPS R10000

 2 GByte 77 GByte 6.4 GFlops
2001–05

Compaq/HP Alphaserver (sc)

 512

DEC Alpha

 0.5 TByte 12TByte 1 TFlop 2,000 31
2005–09

SGI Altix 3700 (ac)

 1920

Intel Itanium

 5.5 TByte 100 TByte 14 TFlop 21,000 26
2009–13

SGI Altix XE (xe)

 1248

Intel Xeon (Nehalem)

 2.5 TByte 90 TByte 14 TFlop 12,000 —
2009–13

Sun/Oracle Constellation (Vayu)

 11,936

Intel Xeon (Nehalem)

 37 TByte 800 TByte 140 TFlop 240,000 35
2013–2019

Fujitsu Primergy (Raijin)

 57,472

Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge)

 160 TByte 12.5 PByte 1195 TFlop 1,600,000 24
2020–Present

Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 (Gadi)

 145152

Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake)

 576 TByte 20 PByte 9260 TFlop 24
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See also

References
  1. "Research Highlights - National Computational Infrastructure". National Computational Infrastructure. Retrieved 25 June 2020.


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