Toss some petaflops onto the barbie
Australia is celebrating the fact it has finally become a
supercomputer superpower after buying one of the top 50 computers in the world.
The supercomputer, jointly funded by the Australian
National University, the CSIRO and the federal government, was officially
launched by Science Minister Kim Carr at its new home today. The supercomputer will be operated by National
Computational Infrastructure and director Lindsay Botten who said that the next
generation research supercomputer will boost Australia's computational research
capacity into world ranking.
The computer provides 12 times more than its predecessor
the four year old obsolete SGI Altix 3700. Dubbed the Vayu, is a Sun
Microsystems Constellation class supercomputer and is due to be up and
running
at full capacity in December.
It contains 11,936 processing cores, so you can think of
that as roughly 6000 home PCs. There is 36 terabytes of memory and 500-600
terabytes of storage. The Vayu is capable of operating at 140 teraflops, which
relates to the speed at which it makes so-called "floating point"
calculations.