Access to computational resources is provided to funding partners as well as researchers awarded grants under the National Computing Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS).[1][2]
HDR Mellanox Infiniband in Dragonfly+ topology (up to 200 Gbit/s transfer)
Tenjin, a 67 TeraFLOP bespoke high-performance partner cloud, consisting of:
1600 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge cores
25 Terabytes of main memory
160 Terabytes State Disk
Data services and storage
NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.
Datasets
NCI hosts multiple data sets that can be used on their computation systems including:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive (ATSIDA) which provides Australian Indigenous research data[7]
Australian Astronomy Optical Data Repository (ODR) including:
Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) current and selected historical datasets[8]
NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001.
In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration.
The table below provides comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.
The Vayu computer cluster, the predecessor of Raijin, was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a Hindu god, the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.
Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one-eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010. Vayu had the following performance characteristics:[12]
The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the center and installation of Vayu.[15] Other participating organizations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine.[14] The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government, made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.[14][15]
