W



elcome to Supercomputing at Swinburne.
 
 
Supercomputing Overview

Since its inception in 1998 the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing has run a supercomputing facility on behalf of Swinburne University of Technology. Originally a linux beowulf cluster the supercomputer has now evolved into a fully-integrated rack-mounted system with a theoretical peak speed in excess of 10 Tflops (10 trillion floating point operations per second). The supercomputer has proven to be an excellent research tool in areas of astronomy ranging from simulations of structure formation in the Universe to the processing of data collected from radio telescopes. It is also used by CAS staff to render content for 3-D animations and movies. More generally, the supercomputer is available for use by Swinburne University researchers and their collaborators.

 

The Green Machine

This current incarnation of the supercomputer was installed at Swinburne in May 2007.
It comprises 145 Dell Power Edge 1950 nodes each with:

2 quad-core Clovertown processors at 2.33 GHz
     (each processor is 64-bit low-volt Intel Xeon 5138)

16 GB RAM

2 x 500 GB drives.

The Clovertown processors offer performance gains with increased performance-per-Watt over previous processors - hence the current cluster being named the Green Machine.

The nodes are controlled by a head node which distributes jobs to the cluster via a queue system controlled by Moab cluster management software. The operating system is CentOS 5 and the machine is maintained by the ITS team^ at Swinburne.

Current users can submit and monitor jobs via the Moab Access Portal.
Usage can be monitored at the ganglia interface.
Documentation on available software is available via the Green Machine wiki.

^Thanks to Daniel Buttigieg, Con Tassios, Wei Hong and Damien Milhuisen.

 

Data Storage

To complement the data storage capabilities of the supercomputer the Centre also has over 100 TB of RAID5 disks and 77 TB of magnetic tape (in the form of 3 S4 DLT Tape robots) available for long-term data storage.





 
Information and Access

For more information about the Swinburne supercomputer, or to request an account, contact:

  Dr Jarrod Hurley
Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218
Hawthorn VIC 3122
Australia

Phone: +61-3 9214 5787
Fax: +61-3 9214 8797
 

Previous Cluster

Prior to May 2007 the CAS supercomputer was a linux beowulf cluster. In 2002 this became only the second machine in Australia to exceed 1 Tflops in performance and by 2004 further expansion provided a theoretical peak speed of 2 Tflops. The cluster comprised the following hardware:
  200 Pentium 4 3.2 GHz nodes
32 Pentium 4 3.0 GHz nodes
90 Dual Pentium 4 2.2 GHz server class nodes.
The operating system on this cluster was SuSE linux and it was networked with gigabit ethernet. The cluster routinely operated at 100% capacity and by 2007, having been over four years since the last major supercomputer upgrade and owing to expansion of CAS (in terms of people and projects), was ripe for replacement. However, some components of this cluster remain in use at Swinburne.

 
Research Focus

Adam Deller is a PhD student using the supercomputer to push the frontiers of radio astronomy.

"Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) makes use of widely separated radio telescopes to make the highest resolution images in astronomy. It utilises the fact that the correlation of signals between different pairs of telescopes contains information about the components of the spatial frequencies of the radio brightness in the patch of sky being observed. Since the telescopes each record data streams of up to 1 Gbps (enough to fill nearly 2 DVDs per minute!), the correlation operation is computationally intensive, and has traditionally been implemented in dedicated hardware. Using a portion of the Swinburne supercomputer, I correlate data from the Australian Long Baseline Array with an aggregate data rate of up to 4.5 Gbps in real time - a process requiring hundreds of Gflops of computational power"