The government will spend $70 million on replacing the ANU-based Raijin supercomputer run by National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).
When the ANU-based Raijin began operating in 2013, it was Australia’s most powerful supercomputer.
The Fujitsu PRIMERGY supercomputer cluster received a boost last year, courtesy of $7 million in funding from the government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Agility Fund and matching funds from NCI’s partners.
The funding bumped Raijin’s performance up to 1.67 petaflops.
“This announcement is very welcome,” NCI board chair Emeritus Professor Michael Barber said today in a statement.
“NCI plays a pivotal role in the national research landscape, and the supercomputer is the centrepiece of NCI’s renowned and tightly integrated, high-performance computing and data environment,” he said.
“The government’s announcement is incredibly important for the national research endeavour,” Barber said.
“It means NCI can continue to provide Australian researchers with a world-class advanced computing environment that is a fusion of powerful computing, high-performance ‘big data’, and world-leading expertise that enables cutting-edge Australian research and innovation.”
The new supercomputer is expected to be ranked in the top 25 internationally, NCI said. It will be commissioned in early 2019.