ACADEMIA

Mellanox Technologies announced that its FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand end-to-end solutions have been selected by Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand as the interconnect of choice for the new Petascale supercomputer for the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)—Australia's high-end research computing service, located at the Australian National University (ANU). NCI's new supercomputer, which will enable scalable applications for innovative research, will integrate Mellanox FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand SX6000 series switches and ConnectX-3 adapter cards for high perform*ance, scalability and extreme power efficiency.

Funded by the Australian Government and a consortium of ANU and a number of national government agencies, the NCI supercomputer will support Australia's scientists in advanced research in application areas including climate change, meteorology, geospatial applications, and astronomy. When it is installed in October 2012, the ANU supercomputer, based on Fujitsu Primergy X-86 technology, will be the largest system based on in the southern hemisphere.

"Providing Australia's scientists with more computing power to conduct research will lead to more scientific breakthroughs for the nation and the rest of the world," said Phil McCormack, Head of Strategy at Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand. "We look forward to continuing our work with NCI, ANU and Mellanox to build one of the most efficient and powerful supercomputers in the world."

"Mellanox's interconnect technology integrated with Fujitsu servers provide users with a scalable and power-efficient system that enables innovative scientific research," said Marc Sultzbaugh, vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox Technologies. "Our FDR InfiniBand solution provides Australian scientists with the performance, scalability and efficiency needed to meet the requirements of research workloads and simulations today and into the future."

As part of the deal, the Mellanox interconnect solutions were provided by Mellanox's local reseller, XENON Systems, who specializes in the deployment of High Performance Computing solutions to leading Australian and New Zealand research organizations.