Intersect Australia Selects SGI and Panasas

Silicon Graphics International
Corporation announced that Intersect Australia Ltd,
a not-for-profit eResearch services and solutions organisation has selected SGI
to provide new High Performance computing (HPC) infrastructure to further research in New South Wales (NSW).

The new supercomputing facility will enable NSW researchers to
continue their ground-breaking work in increasingly competitive environments,
including research in quantum chemistry, computational chemistry, chemical
engineering, climate science, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics and
physics.

The NSW research community represents around a third of Australia’s research
capacity and uses HPC to achieve breakthroughs in areas of national
priority, frontier technologies and innovative science.

Emerging research in these areas of science requires vast amounts of storage and massive computing resources. The SGI 30+ Tflop distributed
memory cluster will provide a greater than 25-fold increase of compute power
and a fivefold increase of disk capacity on the existing system.

"Demand for HPC across
Intersect’s membership is roughly doubling each year," said Dr. Ian
Gibson, Intersect CEO. "This is due
to a rising awareness of Intersect’s HPC facilities as well as the rise in the
need for greater computational power to handle bigger research problems across
many disciplines."

Intersect supports NSW’s research sector, including universities and
relevant public and private sector agencies, by working with their existing
technical capabilities to deliver information and communication technology
enabled platforms.

HPC is one element of an integrated portfolio of infrastructure services
Intersect offers that includes large-scale research storage and
management. The SGI cluster increases the capabilities
supplied to the eResearch community in NSW.

The new research infrastructure is funded through the Australian
Research Council’s Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LEIF)
scheme. The LIEF grant, led by the University of Sydney’s Professor Leo Radom
is supplemented by investments from the University of Sydney, UNSW, UTS,
Macquarie University, the University of Newcastle, the University of
Wollongong, Southern Cross University and the University of New England.

The combined value of the capital investment is greater than $1million.
Intersect will provide the on-going hosting facilities, management and support
of HPC systems on behalf of the consortium of NSW universities. A
procurement process was led by the University of Sydney.

"The workload on
Intersect’s facilities covers a broad range of research across all major
disciplines," said Dr. Gibson, "and this has influenced the choice, design and architecture of the SGI
High Performance Cluster."

The new system features 100 cluster nodes with 1600 cores powered by
the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor series. It also includes 101TB of usable
shared storage delivering 33.3TFlops.

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The SGI HPC cluster is comprised of 10 large compute nodes each with
dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 8-core processors, 256 GB memory, and 1x2TB SATA
drives. System software provided includes SGI Management Center, SGI
Performance Suite, PBS Pro Scheduler and SUSE Linux EnterpriseServer OS.

In addition, there are 88 small compute nodes each with dual Intel Xeon
E5-2600 8-core processors, 64GB memory, 1x1TB SATA drives. The clusters are
connected with QDR IB Non-blocking Interconnect technology. Dual administration
nodes and a system console are also provided. Dual administration nodes and a
system console are also provided. Storage capabilities consist of an SGI NAS
Storage Server with Panasas ActiveStor 12 (parallel file
system) delivering 57TB usable storage.

"SGI has had a long
relationship with Intersect and the University of Sydney where our support and
services expertise is especially valued," said Nick Gorga, GM, SGI
Australia and New Zealand. "The
clear upgrade path from Intersect’s current system to the increased
computational capabilities will accelerate research outcomes in the state."