The CSIRO’s Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) division is to renew its IBM e1350-based high performance compute cluster located at the Bureau of Meteorology’s Head Office in Docklands, Victoria.
The renewal, expected to cost around $840,000, will enable the cluster to provide a range of additional services including specialised cluster services for CSIRO’s Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics division and commercial-in-confidence computing which is required to be done on CSIRO-owned hosts, according to CSIRO documents.
It will also provide services that require access to specialised software, or more flexible environments, that cannot be provided on systems owned by CSIRO partners the Bureau of Meteorology, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and Western Australia’s advanced computing hub, iVEC.
The renewed cluster is also expected to act as development platform for CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research’s relocatable ocean atmosphere model (ROAM) application, a global file system across the cluster, and also integrate with the CSIRO ASC’s Data Store at Docklands.
According to the CSIRO’s ASC, each of the cluster’s computer systems is comprised of nodes with mostly Intel Xeon processors in rack-mounted HS20 blades.
These systems are broken down into four node configurations: 41 nodes have two GB of memory; 28 nodes have four GB of memory; 28 nodes have two GB of memory, Intel64 processors, more disk and Infiniband interconnect; and 26 nodes have eight GB of memory, more disk and faster Intel64 processors.
The CSIRO ASC Data Store is based on an Altix machine with 38 terabytes of disc and hosts a hierarchical data store with data on six terabytes of high-performance disk staged to or from cache disc and magnetic tape cartridges in automatic tape libraries.
As of October 2009, the tape libraries, which have a capacity of five petabytes, held about one petabyte of data.
In November the CSIRO launched its GPU cluster in Canberra.
A slideshow of the GPU cluster can be viewed online.