National Computational Infrastructure

The National Computational Infrastructure (also known as NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research intensive universities and medical research institutes.

The National Computational Infrastructure building at the Australian National University in 2013

Access to computational resources is provided to funding partners as well as researchers awarded grants under the National Computing Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS).[1][2]

The current director is Sean Smith.[3][4]

Notable staff

Facility

The NCI building is located on the ANU campus in Canberra and uses hot aisle containment and free cooling to cool their computers.[2]

Computer systems

As of June 2020, NCI operates two main high-performance computing installations, including:

  • Gadi, meaning 'to search for' in the local Ngunnawal language.[6] a 9.26 PetaFLOP high-performance distributed memory cluster consisting of:[4]
    • 145,152 cores (Intel Xeon Scalable 'Cascade Lake' processors) across 3024 nodes
    • 160 nodes containing four Nvidia V100 GPUs
    • 567 Terabytes of main memory
    • 20 Petabytes of fast storage
    • 47 Petabytes of storage for large data files
    • 50 Petabytes of tape storage for archival
    • HDR Mellanox Infiniband in Dragonfly+ topology (up to 200Gbit/s transfer)
  • Tenjin, a 67 TeraFLOP bespoke high-performance partner cloud, consisting of:
    • 1600 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge cores
    • 25 Terabytes main memory
    • 160 Terabytes State Disk

Data services and storage

NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.

Datasets

NCI hosts multiple data sets that can be used on their computation systems including:

  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive (ATSIDA) which provides Australian Indigenous research data[7]
  • Australian Astronomy Optical Data Repository (ODR) including:
  • Australian National Geophysical Collection (300TB in 2015) including:
  • High resolution 'raw' Indian Ocean sea floor data generated as part of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.[10]

Research

Research conducted or under way includes:[11]

History

NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001.

In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration.

The below table is a comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.

System (name) Processor Memory Storage Peak Perf. Sustained Perf. (SPEC) Initial

Top500 Rank

1987–92

Fujitsu VP100

 Vector 64 MByte 0.15 GFlops
1992–96

Fujitsu VP2200

 Vector 512 MByte 27 GByte 1.25 GFlops
1996–2001

Fujitsu VPP

 Vector/

Scalar

 14 GByte 28 GFlops 59
SGI Power Challenge XL 20

MIPS R10000

 2 GByte 77 GByte 6.4 GFlops
2001–05

Compaq/HP Alphaserver (sc)

 512

DEC Alpha

 0.5 TByte 12TByte 1 TFlop 2,000 31
2005–09

SGI Altix 3700[5] (ac)

 1920

Intel Itanium

 5.5 TByte 100 TByte 14 TFlop 21,000 26
2009–13

SGI Altix XE (xe)

 1248

Intel Xeon (Nehalem)

 2.5 TByte 90 TByte 14 TFlop 12,000 —
2009–13

Sun/Oracle Constellation (Vayu)[5]

 11,936

Intel Xeon (Nehalem)

 37 TByte 800 TByte 140 TFlop 240,000 35
2013–2019

Fujitsu Primergy (Raijin)[9]

 57,472

Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge)

 160 TByte 12.5 PByte 1195 TFlop 1,600,000 24
2020–Present

Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 (Gadi)[4]

 145152

Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake)

 576 TByte 20 PByte 9260 TFlop 24

Vayu

The Vayu computer cluster, the predecessor of Raijin, was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a Hindu god, the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.

Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010. Vayu had the following performance characteristics:[12]

  • Peak performance: 140 TFlops
  • Sustained: 250K SPECfp rate
  • Resources: 110M hrs p.a.

The system comprised:[13]

  • 11936 CPUs in 1492 nodes in Sun X6275 blades, each containing
    • two quad-core 2.93 GHz Intel Nehalem CPUs
    • 24Gbyte DDR3-1333 memory
    • 24GB Flash DIMM for swap and job scratch
  • total: 36.9TB of RAM on compute nodes
  • Dual socket, quad-core Sun X4170, X4270, X4275 servers for Lustre fileserving
  • approx 835TBytes of global user storage

Power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system was approx 605 kW, but all the power was intended to be from green energy sources.[14]

System software for the Vayu cluster includes:[13]

The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the centre and installation of Vayu.[15] Other participating organisations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine.[14] The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.[14][15]

See also

References
  1. Iriarte, Mariana. "Calls for Supercomputing Time in Pawsey's Magnus Are Now Open". HPCwire. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
  2. "Byte me: An inside look at Australia's supercomputer". ABC News. 9 July 2017. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  3. "NCI supercomputing facility names new director". Computerworld. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  4. "ANU supercomputer to answer big questions". The Canberra Times. 4 August 2019. Retrieved 12 August 2022.
  5. "Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot". The Age. 16 November 2009. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
  6. "Gadi, Australia's new supercomputer, ranks 25th most powerful in the world". ABC News. 22 June 2020. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
  7. Turner, Murray. "UC Library Guides: Statistics: Key Resources: Australian Statistics". canberra.libguides.com. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  8. "HPC – Astronomy Australia Limited". Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  9. Jingbo Wang; Evans, Ben; Bastrakova, Irina; Kemp, Carina; Fraswer, Ryan; Wyborn, Lesley (2015). "Bringing Australian Geophysical Data onto a High Performance Data Node at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)". doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.16377.06240. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. Geoscience Australia (17 July 2017). "The data behind the search for MH370: Phase One data released". www.ga.gov.au. Retrieved 13 August 2022.
  11. "Research Highlights - National Computational Infrastructure". National Computational Infrastructure. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
  12. Current Peak System, nci.org.au, accessed 2009-11-17
  13. Sun Constellation cluster, vayu: System Details, nci.org.au, accessed 2010-03-18
  14. Australia's new supercomputer outflops the lot, The Age, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
  15. ANU National Computational Infrastructure National Facility (speech), Senator Kim Carr, 2009-11-16, accessed 2009-11-17
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