The University of Adelaide has pumped an extra $1 million towards increasing the capacity of its supercomputer ‘Phoenix’.
The new investment will help towards doubling storage capacity to 700 terabytes and increase processing speed to 450 teraflops from 300 teraflops.
Since its launch in 2016, user demand on Phoenix increased 300 per cent, with around 30 new researchers using its capacity on a monthly basis and this growth is expected to rise.
Phoenix is based on Lenovo’s System x NeXtScale technology. At the time that it was launched, it featured 15,360 gigabytes of memory and about 4000 cores. Nvidia and Dell were also involved in the technology behind Phoenix.
“With the rising complexity of research, high performance computing (HPC) power is an essential tool for our researchers and collaborators to keep producing world-class research and innovation,” University of Adelaide interim vice chancellor professor, Mike Brooks, said.
“Already we’ve seen that HPC has dramatically lifted research performance and assisted in attracting computational researchers, international collaborations and industry partnerships,” Brooks said.
The upgrade comes roughly five months after Dell EMC was revealed as the technology partner tasked with building the Australian national science agency’s new $4 million supercomputer system, which went live in early July.
The tech company announced on 18 July it had worked with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to build the agency’s new large-scale scientific computing system.
Just a month earlier, it was revealed that Dimension Data had been awarded a $14 million, multi-year IT services contract by the CSIRO to provide commercial off-the-shelf software, hardware, support and maintenance across networking, unified communications, IT security, and datacentre equipment via the IT provider’s eProcurement portal system.
“The contract also provides lifecycle management of CSIRO’s fleet of network attached end points within the above categories,” a spokesperson for the CSIRO told ARN at the time.
