SGI announced that the University of Western Australia has purchased an SGI Rackable high performance computing (HPC) system as part of the Australian Government Super Science Initiative to reinforce Australia's bid for the Square Kilometre Array. The Pawsey Centre, established as a result of the initiative, will be a petascale supercomputing facility managed and operated by iVEC, and will support radio astronomy research objectives. It will also serve as a resource for data-intensive research areas including nanoscience, geoscience, and other computational communities.

The SGI Rackable system selected consists of ten water chilled racks and two storage racks. There are a total of one hundred cluster nodes, with 96 containing Nvidia C2075 GPUs plus four custom server builds each containing Nvidia M2090 GPUs. The solution also includes 192 Intel Xeon X5650 2.66GHz 6-core processors, as well as eight Intel Xeon X5680 3.33GHz 6-core processors and 7.95 terabytes of total memory. Working with DataDirect Networks, SGI also provided 900 terabytes of the DDN-powered SGI Infinite Storage 16000 arrays utilizing the Lustre filesystem.

"iVEC employs the stringent procurement processes of its Centre Agent, CSIRO, to determine the components that will be used in our world-class supercomputing facility," said Professor Andrew Rohl, iVEC Executive Director. "That SGI passed through this process and exceeded the efforts of all competitors confirms our confidence in choosing its products for use in the Pawsey Centre Project."

The HPC system is named 'Fornax,' after the constellation in the southern hemisphere identified by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756, and it will be used for solving data intensive problems for the radio astronomy community. The system is being installed in the Physics Building at University of Western Australia, and will be managed by iVEC.

"SGI is proud to have been involved with iVEC since its inception in 2000, and Fornax is an important new resource for the Western Australian and Australian research community," said Nick Gorga, SGI General Manager, Australia/New Zealand. "SGI is delighted to be part of this important initiative, and we look forward to researchers achieving tremendous results from Fornax for many years."