Vayu (computer cluster)

The Vayu computer cluster, was the predecessor of Raijin, the Current Peak System of the Australian National Computational Infrastructure, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. It was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a [Hindu] god], the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr,[2] after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.[3]

Performance

Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010.

Vayu has the following performance characteristics:[1]

  • Peak performance: 140 TFlops
  • Sustained: 250K SPECfp rate
  • Resources: 110M hrs p.a.

Physical system

The system comprises:[2]

  • 11936 CPUs in 1492 nodes in Sun X6275 blades, each containing
    • two quad-core 2.93 GHz Intel Nehalem CPUs
    • 24Gbyte DDR3-1333 memory
    • 24GB Flash DIMM for swap and job scratch
  • total: 36.9TB of RAM on compute nodes
  • Dual socket, quad-core Sun X4170, X4270, X4275 servers for Lustre fileserving
  • approx 835TBytes of global user storage

Power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system will be approx 605 kW, but all the power used will be from green energy sources.[3]

Software

System software for the Vayu cluster includes:[2]

Funding

The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the centre and installation of Vayu.[4] Other participating organisations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine.[3]

The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government have already made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.[3][4]

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See also

References
  1. Current Peak System, nci.org.au, accessed 2009-11-17
  2. Sun Constellation cluster, vayu: System Details, nci.org.au, accessed 2010-03-18
  3. Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot, The Age, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
  4. ANU National Computational Infrastructure National Facility (speech), Senator Kim Carr, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
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