The $80 million Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has completed the final upgrade of its ‘Magnus’ machine, which provides processing power in excess of a petaflop. Magnus, the largest research computer in the Southern Hemisphere, is a Cray XC30 system with more than 35,000 cores using Intel’s new Xeon’s E5-2600 v3 processors. A petaflop machine can complete one quadrillion floating point operations per second. It follows the launch in August 2012 of Pawsey’s terascale supercomputer, dubbed Fornax. The Pawsey facility is run by iVEC, a collaboration between the CSIRO, the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, Curtin University, and Edith Cowan University. The CSIRO has been eyeing a petascale computer since late 2011 to crunch data for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomy telescopes projects. Magnus will also be used by researchers in the areas of nanotechnology, high energy physics, medical research, mining and petroleum, architecture and construction, and urban planning. Pawsey Supercomputing Centre executive director, Dr Neil Stringfellow, said Pawsey currently runs 100 science projects being run by 500 plus users at any one time. Dr Stringfellow said researchers from Curtin University had already used the machine – running the earlier Intel Xeon E5-2600 v1 processors – to do lung simulations using a ‘moving mesh’ computational approach. “This helps us to understand how the lungs work – it’s the largest lung simulation in the world,” he said. This research will help people with asthma, for example, by creating improved aerosol medications, he said. Scientific researchers were so keen to get access to computing power provided by this machine that Pawsey was three times oversubscribed in the number of CPU hours that were available to give away. There was demand for 250 million CPU hours from researchers in mining, geoscience, bioinformatics, and ‘blue sky’ research in astronomy around galaxy formations. “What we have here is a world-class scientific instrument,” he said. Dr Stringfellow told CIO Australia that Pawsey had no plans to install a quantum computer in the near future. Meanwhile, the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 chips include platform telemetry sensors and metrics for CPU, memory and I/O usage, as well as thermal sensors that monitor airflow and outlet temperature. A cache monitoring feature also provides data that lets orchestration tools intelligently place and rebalance workloads, resulting in faster completion times. It also conducts analysis of performance anomalies due to competition for cache in a multi-tenant cloud environment where there is little visibility into what workloads consumers are running, Intel said. Follow CIO Australia on Twitter and Like us on Facebook… Twitter: @CIO_Australia, Facebook: CIO Australia, or take part in the CIO conversation on LinkedIn: CIO Australia Follow Byron Connolly on Twitter:@ByronConnolly Related content Feature Industry clouds prove their business value Born of partnerships and ecosystem-centric by their nature, cloud solutions aimed at specific verticals are taking root, forming a complex, rapidly evolving market CIOs must be strategic about entering. By Paula Rooney Mar 24, 2023 7 mins Cloud Computing Feature What is data governance? Best practices for managing data assets Data governance defines roles, responsibilities, and processes for ensuring accountability for and ownership of data assets across the enterprise. By Thor Olavsrud Mar 24, 2023 10 mins IT Governance Frameworks Big Data Data Mining BrandPost Stay in Control of Your Data with a Secure and Compliant Sovereign Cloud By Stan Kwong Mar 23, 2023 6 mins Cloud Security Cloud Computing News Accenture to lay off 19,000 to cut costs amid economic uncertainty Technology services giant Accenture will continue to hire but meanwhile is cutting staff to streamline operations in the face of economic headwinds. By Anirban Ghoshal Mar 23, 2023 2 mins IT Consulting Services Technology Industry Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe