New Supercomputer Boosts Aussie SKA Telescope Bid

angry tapir writes "Australian academic supercomputing consortium iVEC has acquired another major supercomputer, Fornax, to be based at the University of Western Australia, to further the country's ability to conduct data-intensive research. The SGI GPU-based system, also known as iVEC@UWA, is made up of 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU, 48 GB RAM and 7TB of storage. All up, the system has 1152 cores, 96 GPUs and an additional dedicated 500TB fabric attached storage-based global filesystem. The system is a boost to the Australian-NZ bid to host the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope."

Re:

[Errol backfiring]

I already have trouble to fit a Christmas tree into my house. A square kilometer array is a bit too big for me alas.

Re:

[phil_aychio]

I would request that the author change the subject of TFS to "Mining bitcoins down under"

And still...

[Zaldarr]

And still it can't run Crysis...

Re:

[Anubis350]

Not that the c2050's drivers are optimized for gaming, but it certainly has the grunt to play games, I've done it on the one in my tower right now :-p

So ...

[Mick R]

should we put another GPU on the barbie for them?

Re:

[crutchy]

c'mon... we don't "put" anything on the barbie here. stuff is always chucked on :)
i hope australia gets the ska. we have a factional space industry, but every bit extra helps

Re:

[martin-boundary]

D'you think there's room, with Ken on there already?...

Small fry

[Axman6]

This machine is tiny compared to at least one other open supercomputer in Australia, the Vayu [nci.org.au] cluster at the National Computing Infrastructure's NAtional Facility in Canberra, which has a bit less than 12,000 cores, several petabytes of storage (tape and disk), and I believe some GPU's attached (the Xe [nci.org.au] system at the NCI NF has 16 Fermi cards).

In the scheme of things, this probably won't help the bid much at all given its small size (and the truly astronomical amount of data the SKA will produce). But tha

Re:

[ciderbrew]

I've never been able to get my head around that fact. When an Aussie says "A 3-day drive". He's not using the UK understanding. Drive for a little bit, park up, sleep and set off the next day. He means a 72 hour drive add extra for sleep. The place is HUGE!

Re:

[TrogL]

I've done most of that drive. I'd place it closer to 5 days. It's 16 hours from Edmonton to Vancouver alone.

Re:

[commlinx]

but who is making the rest of the kit?

Rolf Harris is making a modified versions of his wobble board [wikipedia.org] modified for resonance at RF frequencies. If you go to his official website listed under references the FAQ describes how to construct your own.

Re:

[garatheus]

As a South African, I really hope that we're able to have the SKA Telescope here. The problem is, that the bandwidth issue is still a major issue, and providing the infrastructure to it in a remote area seems like a bit of a problem, especially considering that in the last report I read on it, that Telkom (the monopoly that keeps us constrained from really getting any decent level of Internet technologies at a reasonable price).

has tripled the expected cost of providing the infrastructure to the SKA site.

Re:

[Chrisq]

Leave science to the white-boys and get back in your tree

Who says he's not? Ignorant fool.

Who says he's not what? In a tree?

Re:

[fezzzz]

Technology in South Africa is being developed at a rapid pace as their bid for SKA is gaining ground. With the completion of the first 7 antennas on the KAT-7 [ska.ac.za] project, the first use of composite materials for dish reflectors. With Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya and Ghana partnering with South Africa [africagoodnews.com] in the bid, Africa seems to have overcome all the major obstacles associated with the project. Nokia is willing to supply the 15 petabyte per second infrastructure and

Km2? Not a lot for radio astronomy anymore.

[niktemadur]

Considering that the distance between 2 or more synchronized antennae becomes part of the radio telescope itself, the RadioAstron [newscientist.com] gives me chills just thinking about it, some astonishing science should come out of this bad boy.

Re:

[RogerWilco]

While space based VLBI is certainly cool, and some of the components in RadioAstron were developed at my company, it doesn't compare to the SKA.

The RadioAstron has a 10 m antenna, so about 75 m2 collecting area. The SKA will have a of about 1000000 m2. (square kilometer). The baselines will be up to 6-7000 km long in some possible variants, compared to the 189000km of the Radioastron.

So the spacial resolution might be a bit smaller (7000/189000 = 0.037), but the sensitivity is much lower (75/1000000=0.00007

Not this one...it's successor

[GroovyTrucker]

I'm waiting for the newer model. It'z da Reggae Telescope, mon!

Wow...

[mjpaci]

This is totally one step beyond! It's madness!

Still too small...

[DerekLyons]

In other words, their new "supercomputer" still brings less to the table than all but the smallest of BOINC projects.

Re:

[neonsignal]

apart from decent working memory for each node, low inter-node latencies, and a filesystem

Re:

[RogerWilco]

The main thing actually is bandwidth.

Radioastronomy needs a lot of CPU power, but compared to other things like the stuff that uses BOINC, it needs a lot of bandwidth.

For example our current LOFAR system handles 200 Gb/s with a 12.000 core BlueGene and a ~3200 core, 200 machine cluster and about 6 PB of storage.

At full resolution we would write 2 PB per 24 hours.

With 2 million BOINC users, it would require an average stream of about 1 Mb/s per user, if each of them is online for 2.4 hours a day.

In other wor

LOFAR

[RogerWilco]

The BlueGene Stella at LOFAR central processing currently does 37 TFLops, which is about the same as this new Fornax system the article mentions (40 TFlops).

The Stella was a big computer in 2005 in http://science.slashdot.org/story/05/05/01/2316248/When-Lofar-Meets-Stella [slashdot.org]

Not so impressive in 2011.

It's the difference between being #6 on the supercomputer top 500, or not even making it.

And while LOFAR is running several other clusters besides the Stella, and manages to handle 200 GB/s, SKA is supposed to hand