SGI has announced on Tuesday that the University of Queensland in Australia has commissioned a high performance computing (HPC) solution consisting of SGI Rackable half-depth servers to support a broad range of research applications.

The new HPC system is reportedly one of the largest in Australia with 3,144 processor cores built with Intel Xeon processors 5500 and 7500 series, 11.52 TB memory and 249 TB of disk storage.

It is expected to be used for technical computing research applications, including bioinformatics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, earth sciences, market economics and image processing.

Also, researchers from universities in Queensland and partner organizations across Australia will leverage the powerful and energy-efficient SGI Rackable half-depth servers to greatly accelerate their scientific discoveries.

SGI said that its rackable half-depth servers use DC-based racks and innovative cooling techniques to minimise power usage and deliver a range of configurations to suit the University's current and future requirements.

The system also includes an InfiniBand QDR high-performance interconnect using Voltaire Grid Director 4700 switches and the Unified Fabric Manager software switching technology.

The Panasas file system using PAS-8 technology is architected to accelerate data-intensive applications that require high performance I/O with minimal administrative overheads.

SGI Professional Services is providing project management, installation services, datacenter services, training, ongoing consultation and maintenance