DEVELOPER TOOLS

As Australia's scientific community convenes this week to assess the latest trends in computing-based research, the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) announced it has fully completed deployment of its 1,680-processor supercomputer from Silicon Graphics. SGI and APAC made the announcement today as high-performance computing (HPC) users gathered to learn about new breakthroughs in research at the APAC Conference & Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and Research. APAC's SGI Altix 3700 system, ranked as one of the most powerful computers on Earth, has for several months served as a resource for researchers and graduate students from throughout Australia. Now fully deployed, the APAC system serves more than 800 researchers from 27 universities and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). APAC's SGI supercomputer has increased the organization's computing capability tenfold. Operational since May, the system has already been applied to such broad areas as: earth sciences, for reconstructing the evolution of the earth's crust and mantle; astronomy, for modeling planet formations and the evolution of galaxies; computational chemistry, for developing new materials and pharmaceuticals; and oceanography, for studying the influence of the southern ocean and sea ice on the world's climate. The APAC system is also part of a nationwide computing grid that relies heavily on SGI supercomputers located throughout Australia. The latest addition to the grid is a 160-processor SGI Altix 3700 system at the Western Australian Interactive Virtual Environments Centre (IVEC), which is an APAC partner. "The new system lifts Australia's research infrastructure, encouraging the uptake of eResearch locally," said Professor John O'Callaghan, executive director, APAC. "We expect that it will substantially increase Australia's world standing in advanced computing and grid capabilities." APAC's Altix 3700 Bx2 system has a total of 1,680 Intel Itanium 2 processors, 3.6TB of memory, 120TB of SGI InfiniteStorage capacity, and Brocade 24000 fibre channel switches. The software environment comprises the SuSE Linux operating system with SGI ProPack, SGI CXFS file sharing software and the Intel range of software development compilers and tools from Intel. The system was listed as the 26th most powerful in the world on the TOP500 list (June 2005). "The APAC National Facility provides a world-class service for Australian researchers and SGI is proud to be the supplier of the next generation system for the facility," said Bill Trestrail, regional managing director for South Asia Pacific, SGI. "This tremendous record of service delivery has been made possible by the outstanding skills of the staff working in the National Facility."