The high performance SGI Altix compute cluster, named “Katabatic” by the university after hurricane-speed winds found in Antarctica, offers 64 clustered blade servers (512 processors) and a terabyte of RAM, which will enable 2 teraflops of peak compute power – four times the performance of the legacy system it replaces. Katabatic also has 71,680GB of hard drive space and 524,288GB of mirrored tape storage.

Thirty full-time TPAC users and more than 100 university researchers in the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC), the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), the School of Chemistry, the School of Maths and Physics, and the Menzies Research Institute share access to Katabatic every day.

“Katabatic supports vital, nationally important research for projects requiring state-of-the-art HPC capabilities, including in ocean, atmosphere, Antarctic ice sheet and climate modeling, computational chemistry and fluid dynamics,” said Dr. Nathan Bindoff, University of Tasmania professor and partnership director, and Nobel Laureate. “SGI Altix ICE supercomputers help our HPC facility maintain UTAS’ position as a leading center for marine and climate research in Australia.”

"SGI Altix ICE is a fundamental tool that will help the University of Tasmania advance its globally significant climate research,” said Al Dei Maggi, vice president of sales for Japan and Asia Pacific at SGI. “Altix ICE will give its users tremendous compute performance and storage capacity to continue their important work.”