The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.
CSIRO's GPU cluster being installed at the Data Centre.
Speeding up science: CSIRO's CPU-GPU supercomputer cluster
CSIRO's latest supercomputer cluster will be among the world's first to combine traditional CPUs with more powerful graphics processing units or GPUs, providing a world class computational and simulation science facility to advance priority CSIRO science.
The new CSIRO high performance computing cluster will deliver up to 256 plus Teraflops of computing performance and will consist of the following components:
128 Dual Xeon E5462 Compute Nodes (i.e. a total of 1024 2.8GHz compute cores) with 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM, 500 GB SATA storage and DDR InfiniBand interconnect
64 Tesla S1070 (256 GPUs with a total of 61 440 streaming processor cores)
144 port DDR InfiniBand Switch expandable to 144 ports
80 Terabyte Hitachi NAS file system.
The cluster is supplied by Xenon Systems of Melbourne and is located in Canberra, Australia.
GPU technology
Watch this video about the new CSIRO graphic processing unit (GPU) cluster.
The unique feature of the CSIRO GPU supercomputer is the use of NVIDIA GPU technology to deliver outstanding computational performance at low cost and low energy demand.
A single Tesla S1070 can deliver up to 4.14 TFlops of single precision floating point performance and 345 GFlops of double precision floating point performance.
CSIRO science applications have already seen 10-100x speedups on NVIDIA GPUs.
Driving computational and simulation science
The CSIRO GPU supercomputer will support computational and simulation science research across CSIRO.
The technology can be used to support CSIRO research in the areas of:
“We've all heard desktop supercomputer claims in the past, but this time it's for real. Heterogeneous computing, where GPUs work in tandem with CPUs, is what makes such a breakthrough possible.”
Dr Burton Smith, Technical Fellow, Microsoft
computational biology
climate and weather
multi-scale modelling
computational fluid dynamics
computational chemistry
astronomy and astrophysics
computational imaging and visualisation
advanced materials modelling
computational geosciences.
E-research agenda
E-research underpins the future delivery of great science.
Modern scientific research is increasingly generating vast quantities of highly complicated data. Making the most of the rich information it contains is the key to success.
Handling and interrogating this information requires advances in data management, computing and collaboration tools – of which the CSIRO GPU Supercomputer is one.
Our e-research agenda is supporting CSIRO’s Transformational Capability Platforms, building our capability to sustain and accelerate the delivery of solutions for national challenges.
The Platforms are:
computational and simulation science
transformational biology
sensors and sensor networks
advanced materials.
To find out more about CSIRO's new Central Processing Unit (CPU)-GPU supercomputer cluster and its capabilities contact:
CSIRO's new supercomputer cluster will be among the world's first to combine regular CPUs with more powerful graphics processing units or GPUs
GPUs, typically used in technology to power computer game graphics, can improve scientific computing by multi-tasking and increasing processing speeds, allowing CSIRO scientists to take on much more complex and challenging research problems
The CPU-GPU supercomputer will likely be ranked in the top 500 fastest computers in the world and will process data at Teraflop speeds, putting Australia on the forefront of computer science facilities
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.
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