Swinburne Gets Super
Swinburne Gets Super
August 24th, 2007: Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) in Victoria now has one of the fastest supercomputers in Australia, IDM talks with Dr. Matthew Bailes, director of the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing at Swinburne to find out what this beast can do.
SUT now has a 10.8 Teraflop computing cluster based on 145 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers with dual-processor quad-core "Clovertown" Intel processors. The new implementation is already paying dividends with users who were having difficulty getting telescope time now having “so much power they do not have to worry about them not getting onto the telescope” Bailes said.
The Astrophysics and Supercomputing department at SUT is involved with simulating the entire universe as well as searching for nuetron stars in radio data from the largest radio telescopes in the southern hemisphere. The new supercomputer will allow for more effective scheduling and SUT is “now in a position to attempt much more ambitious projects” Bailes said.
Bailes described how one user who was hunting for new planets around certain stars managed to achieve in 4 weeks what would have taken 4 years on his regular system.
Previously, the Astrophysics and supercomputer department at SUT were running an in-house cluster with 96 dual processors to which 232 desktop machines were added to boost processing power. Bailes’ department has literally ripped every one of the old nodes out with the new supercomputer replacing the entire system.
The new system is also much ‘greener’ then the previous setup, “the new machine only using 20 watts of processor core compared to the previous machine using 160 watts” Bailes said. The addition of new cooling systems has also contributed to the previous performance capacity of 200 effective processes increased to 1100 processes on the new system.