ANU
Fujitsu has been selected to design, implement and for the ongoing maintenance of the new supercomputer at The Australian National University in Canberra.
The new machine dubbed Gadi will replace the existing one, Raijin, also build by Fujitsu back in 2012.
Gadi will be operated by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and it is expected to replace the existing machine in November 2019.
Fujitsu was unable to provide the value of the contract however, the project is backed by a $70 million funding provided by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
The solution Fujitsu will provide is based on its own technology and also counts on tech from Lenovo, Intel, Nvidia, NetApp, Mellanox Technologies, DDN (Lustre), Altair and APC by Schneider Electric
"NCI plays a pivotal role in the national research landscape, and the supercomputer is the centrepiece of this important work," said professor Brian Schmidt, vice-chancellor at ANU.
"The upgrade of this critical infrastructure will see Australia continue to play a leading role in addressing some of our greatest global challenges."
The new supercomputer will rely on both Fujitsu and Lenovo Neptune direct liquid cooling technologies with warm water, allowing for high-density computing. The system features Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 M5 servers and will include second-generation Intel Xeon Platinum processors, Intel Optane DC persistent memory and Nvidia V100 GPUs to accelerate deep learning training and inferencing.
"This new machine will keep Australian research and the 5,000 researchers who use it at the cutting-edge. It will help us get smarter with our big data. It will add even more brawn to the considerable brains already tapping into NCI," Schmidt added.
NetApp will provide enterprise class storage arrays that will be clustered together in a DDN Lustre parallel file system delivering terabyte scale data transfer speeds. The inter-connect network is architected using Mellanox’s latest generation HDR InfiniBand technology in a Dragonfly+ topology, capable of transferring data at 200 GB/s per second. Altair’s PBS Works Suite software will optimise job scheduling and workload management.
According to Fujitsu, researchers from organisations including the CSIRO, Geosciences Australia, and the Bureau of Meteorology will benefit from faster speeds and higher capacity compared to the existing supercomputer.
In May, Fujitsu's Laboratories director Hirotaka Hara revealed the company is developing a "real quantum computer".
Hara told Computerworld the company is working with a number of research groups to develop a "true" quantum machine.
The company is already pitching its "quantum inspired" Digital Annealer to businesses, a classical chip designed to solve complex combinatorial optimisation problems.
