PHYSICS

Australia's universities and government have poured $4.5 million into a 160 Itanium processors Silicon Graphics Altix supercomputer that will allow them to run calculations for complex research at 830 gigaflops. The system will be owned by the SA Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC), with access for researchers at the state's three universities, and in private industry. The SAPAC runs other supercomputers, including an IBM 1350 cluster networked using a Myrinet architecture and a Sun cluster. SAPAC director Tony Williams said many Australian supercomputers were clusters of machines. Clusters can develop bottlenecks in networking between the different processors. He said "The purists would argue a cluster is not a supercomputer, my argument is the work it does." Professor Williams said applications for the computer included bioinformatics, engineering and water resource management. Corporate use would also be promoted, he said. "One of our missions is technological diffusion — to get people to take on advanced computing for business," Professor Williams said. "At the moment industry uses it when it has to, and not because it can. They don't use it as a way of planning or developing new products." South Australian scientists and researchers will now be able to make their discoveries much more quickly, thanks to the purchase of a new supercomputer, Aquila. Minister for Science and Information Economy, Trish White says, “this purchase will enable scientists and technologists to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems super fast.” The purchase was made possible by a State Government grant of $1.035 million. The SA Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) along with contributions from SGI (also known as Silicon Graphics), Intel and the South Australian Consortium for IT&T (SACITT), put the package together. “This is yet another sign of the Rann Government working with business, industry and our universities to foster sound economic development,” the Minister says. “The State Government sees this as a further investment in fundamental infrastructure for South Australia’s Research and Development community. It follows the Premier’s recent $1.4 million commitment to the groundbreaking SABRENet project, which will provide ultra-fast broadband connectivity for the State’s researchers. “We’ve set targets in our State Strategic Plan about investment in science, research and innovation and we intend to build on South Australia’s proud history of science excellence.” The new supercomputer offers breakthroughs in scientific disciplines as diverse as salinity, climate modelling, genetics, physics, chemistry, bioinformatics, fluid dynamics, petroleum engineering, geophysics, cancer treatment and nanotechnology. “This will be of great benefit to South Australia and the industries which will utilise both the scientific outcomes and the new facility itself. The high speed performance is made possible by the unique design of the new SGI Altix supercomputer. SAPAC serves as the focus for the support of advanced, high-performance, and grid computing in South Australia and is a joint venture of the three South Australian Universities: the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and the University of South Australia. Mr Bill LaRosa, SGI's senior vice president for the Inter Continental region says, “we are delighted to be working with SAPAC, and we look forward to a very productive relationship with South Australia's world class scientists. Providing answers to the biggest scientific problems today will lead to a better South Australia, and to a more liveable world.” SGI chairman and CEO Bob Bishop is a South Australian and a known advocate of Australian science leading the way in discovering answers to major problem. “I’m very pleased that South Australia is taking this exciting leap towards performing critically important science. The new SGI Altix supercomputer will help to achieve this outcome, and fuel economic growth for South Australia,” Mr Bishop says. The State Government allocated $3.135 million this financial year to grow the State’s high performance computing capacity, and to support the development of an ultra high speed telecommunications link, SABRENet.