Raijin the supercomputer celebrates his first birthday

Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is celebrating the first birthday of Raijin, the Southern Hemisphere’s fastest supercomputer.

In his first year of operation, Raijin has already helped to discover the oldest known star in the universe and the reason Australia is recording more droughts.

Raijin also supports ANU Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt’s Southern Sky mapping project and research into climate variability that underpins Australia’s contributions to reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Raijin, named after the Japanese Shinto god of thunder, lightning and storms,  is capable of performing at 1.2 petaflops (one thousand trillion calculations per second), and can perform in one hour what would take 11,000 years to do on a laptop. The 70 tonne supercomputer is housed at the NCI in Canberra.

“Raijin is a national computing resource used by more than 3000 Australian researchers, government agencies and industry,” says NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten.

“Almost every field of research now relies on high performance and data computing. Raijin enables researchers to expand the scale and ambition of their research, while saving time and money.

“We are very pleased to help him celebrate his first birthday.”

NCI is supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, with operational funding provided through a formal Collaboration incorporating the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, ANU and Geoscience Australia.