HPC 2014-15 | Markets


The future of HPC in Australia


Lindsay Botten and Neil Stringfellow explain how Australia has developed a national HPC strategy to address the country’s unique challenges in science, climate, and economic development


Australia, with a population less than Beijing, but with the 12th largest global economy, has traditionally punched above its weight in the international research stakes. Australia’s challenge now is to translate this research capacity and economic power more strongly into innovation and wealth creation, in a world in which increasingly ‘to outcompute is to outcompete’. Challenges also arise from Australia’s tenure


of a resource-rich, island continent and a climate that experiences severe weather events including cyclones, floods, and bushfires. Te realisation of national benefits and economic outcomes, and the management of environmental risks, demands continental-scale simulation and data- management capabilities, which, in turn, requires investments in world-class research infrastructure and skills. High-performance computing is consequently


a crucial element in advancing research, economic competitiveness, and our national wellbeing, with the unique challenges of the Australian environment providing a significant and particular focus for the current development of a national e-infrastructure strategy.


Australia’s HPC landscape: history and current status Te use of supercomputers in Australia can be traced back to the late 1960s, led by two national agencies, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), and the national science agency, CSIRO — driven by the need for numerical weather prediction and computational support for research. Since then, these two agencies have operated separate and shared facilities, which have included IBM, CDC, Cray, Fujitsu, and NEC systems, and most recently an Oracle Constellation cluster. Australia’s university community lagged in its uptake of HPC until 1987, when the


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the petascale systems will be joined by a new operational meteorological services facility for BoM. NCI and Pawsey are the national systems,


A Landsat 8 image of the Wynham-Kununurra region of Western Australia, taken from the GA Data Cube, showing enhanced water features and mangroves in the mouth of the Ord River.


Australian National University (ANU), in Canberra, established its own supercomputing facility, commencing with Facom vector systems. Te absence of a national strategy for research HPC was addressed in the late 1990s, leading to the establishment, at ANU, of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) which would later evolve into the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Since 2000, the computational capability at APAC/ NCI has risen over 1000-fold from a one-teraflop HP Alphaserver, through SGI and Sun/Oracle systems, to the current Fujitsu Primergy system, Raijin, commissioned in 2012. It has 57,472 Intel (Sandy Bridge) cores and a performance of 1,200 teraflops. In 2014, there are three petascale HPC systems


in Australia: Raijin at NCI (www.nci.org.au); a 35,000 core, 1,500 teraflop Cray XC-30, Magnus, at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (www. ivec.org) in Perth, Western Australia (WA); and a 65,536 core, 840 teraflop, IBM Blue Gene Q at the Victorian Life Science Computation Initiative (VLSCI, www.vlsci.org.au) in Melbourne. Tese are augmented by tier 2 facilities at CSIRO, including a substantial GPU cluster, a dedicated system for radio astronomy research at the Pawsey Centre, and smaller systems in some national agencies and university consortia. In 2015 to 16,


funded by Australia’s National Research Infrastructure Strategy, while VLSCI is a specialist life sciences facility, established for Victorian researchers and funded by that State Government. Te investments in NCI and Pawsey are correspondingly prioritised, towards climate/ weather science and the environment for NCI, and the geosciences and the Square Kilometre Array project for Pawsey. While each national facility also supports the gamut of scientific and technological research, this investment prioritisation is likely to continue, and be amplified by expectations of increasing usage by industry.


The current distinctive environment Perhaps what most distinguishes NCI and Pawsey among international petascale facilities is the funding model, in which all recurrent operating costs must be met by co-investment – a requirement of the government’s funding programme. Tis has shaped the partnerships that support these facilities, the focus of activities, and the access models, which combine partner shares and merit-based access, and also reflect investment priorities. Today, institutional co-investment is seen as synonymous with the value of government infrastructure investments. NCI and Pawsey respectively generate annual co-investment incomes of around $11M and $8M, from partnerships that include national science agencies, research-intensive universities, and in the case of Pawsey, the Western Australian State Government. Co-investment at such levels engenders


strong governance, and expectations that operations are of research-production standard, and services are comprehensive and integrated,


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