Australia's supercomputers need 'urgent' refresh, or life-saving research at risk

High Performance Computing facilities await investment decision

The whitefly is having a devastating effect across East Africa by spreading viruses to the cassava plant, a staple food in the region. An infestation can decimate an entire harvest, leading to economic hardship and famine.

While they look identical, there are actually many species of whitefly. In order to develop resistant crops, they must be distinguished and the best way to do this is to examine their genetic differences.

Professor Laura Boykin and her colleagues at the University of Western Australia have been collecting whiteflies, extracting the insect DNA, and using sequencing machines to generate their genome.

To make sense of the billions of genetic base pairs, researchers have to apply sophisticated algorithms, to genetically distinguish the flies. That process takes significant computational resource. It takes a supercomputer like Magnus.

Magnus is Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth’s flagship machine, and one of the most powerful supercomputers in Australia. The most powerful is Raijin, operated by National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University.

But Australia’s two Tier 1 high performance computing (HPC) research facilities are in “urgent” need of a refresh. Their supercomputers are fast approaching end-of-life, just as demand from academics needing the compute power to crunch massive datasets is rising.

It’s not hyberbolic – given research such as Boykins’ – to say there are lives at stake.

"HPC and genomics is the future," Boykin told Computerworld. "Building capacity at the integration of these two disciples is key to solving huge problems – like famine in East Africa."

Professor Laura Boykin with farmers near Mbinga, Tanzania. Credit: Laura Boykin
Professor Laura Boykin with farmers near Mbinga, Tanzania. Credit: Laura Boykin

Rank slip

There comes a point in every supercomputer’s lifecycle when they are not so super anymore.

When it became fully operational in 2014, Pawsey’s petascale system Magnus was the 41st most powerful computer in the world.

By 2015 it had slipped to 58 on the LINPACK Benchmark Top500 ranking. The latest list, released last month, placed Magnus at 111.

“The problem is compute technology – in many ways it accelerates faster than you'd like it to!” says David Schibeci, head of supercomputing at Pawsey. “At a certain point, we understand that all supercomputers have an end of life.”

The support contract for Magnus – which is currently running at near capacity – lapses in September. Pawsey has received a government funding boost to cover its next two years of operations.

“Part of that money will be to extend that support contract so we can still look after Magnus,” Schibeci explains.

The NCI’s Raijin supercomputer currently comes in at number 70 in the world ranking, with a performance of 1.67 Petaflops – comparable to about 40,000 desktop computers working simultaneously. When it debuted in 2012, Raijin was placed at 24.

The current ranking is only thanks to an upgrade last year – paid for by an emergency government ‘Agility Fund’ – which helped Raijin rise from 121st place in 2016.

“However, despite this upgrade, NCI’s core computer is fast approaching the end of its serviceable life and requires urgent replacement,” the NCI said in a statement last month.

Without upgrades, vital research cannot happen, says the NCI.

“Without a replacement for NCI’s current computer, the competitiveness of Australia’s research will suffer and much important research will simply not be possible,” the organisation said.

It is not so much the hardware that is important, but the research it enables, says Pawsey's Schibeci.

“What is a supercomputer?" he says. "It is a very power hungry, very noisy piece of scientific equipment that allows researchers to answer their questions quicker, so they can ask the next question and the next question after that."

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags supercomputersresearchhpcNational Computational Infrastructure (NCI)Australian National University (ANU)high performance computing (HPC)Simon BirminghamUniversity of Western Australia (UWA)Pawsey Supercomputing CentreAlan Finkel

More about AdvancedAustraliaAustralian National UniversityDepartment of IndustryNational ResearchTechnologyUniversity of Western Australia

Show Comments
[]