Dell delivers high-performance cloud for NCI

Dell has been contracted to supply a 3200 core high-performance computer cloud for the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).

The $2 million contract will see the establishment of a node of the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Research Cloud within Australia’s richest computational and data-intensive research environment.

“The establishment of a cloud alongside the NCI petascale supercomputer and the National High-Performance Data Node of the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) initiative will enhance the scale of data-intensive science, leveraging the impact and value of each infrastructure component,” said NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten.

“As the nature of research becomes increasingly collaborative, the cloud will support users with self-service abilities to publish research data, share knowledge and rapidly access software applications.

“The node capability will be enhanced by NCI’s investment in high-performance hardware - Infiniband interconnect, large memory and accelerators - and will provide extended access to cloud-appropriate applications from the extensive software library via an implementation of the NCI operating environment in a virtual machine.”

Dell’s contract with NCI will see the development of comprehensive digital laboratories that will advance research in climate change, earth system science, the environment and geosciences, while providing valued computation services to serve the needs of other research communities.

“The NCI solution is a testament to the progress Dell has made in being able to provide end-to-end solutions for all of our customers,” said Joe Kremer, managing director, Dell Australia and New Zealand. “What we developed with NCI is a unique open-stack cloud solution that showcases the power and potential of the cloud and will enable greater collaboration, research and development for all Australians.”

The cloud will complement the compute power of Australia’s highest performance supercomputer, Raijin, a 1.2 petaflop Fujitsu Primergy cluster (ranked 27th in the world) with 57,472 cores, 160 terabytes of memory, 10 petabytes of storage and a Mellanox FDR Infiniband interconnect with 9 terabytes per second bandwidth.

Source: the National Computational Infrastructure.