Monday, 1 October 2007

At The University of Western Australia (UWA), there are a number of unique projects, some in the areas of medicine, science and engineering, that are critically dependent on advanced high-end and large-scale computing and data management. Recognising this critical need, a $5million state of the art Western Australian Supercomputer Program (WASP) facility was established at UWA. The plan is for this facility to address much-needed computing capacity and support simulation research.

Associate Professor Karen Haines (Director), along with her computational research group, established the WASP facility through successful grants and a substantial investment partnership between UWA and iVEC.

The WASP has substantially built upon and formalised the iVEC and UWA partnership’s intent to capture and create a hub for advanced computing in Western Australia. The WASP is one of only three established iVEC facilities making it one of Australia’s most prestigious and competitive supercomputing and scientific visualisation centres.
Activities within WASP will continue to build upon the State Government’s support of computational and visualisation facilities for Western Australia and the computing demands planned for the state over the next decade.

Associate Professor Haines said “The WASP aims to integrate large-scale information from different disciplines and multiple spatial and temporal scales to enable cross-fertilisation of algorithms, and integrate common computational techniques to advance science across all fields”.

The WASP facility is situated on the ground floor of the Physics Building on the UWA campus and will be focused on providing next-generation computing and scientific visualisation technologies to Western Australian researchers and scientists.
Powering the WASP is the key high performance computational Cray XT3 ‘Marron’, which is a newly acquired massively parallel processor system. Marron is the first supercomputer of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere that will be accessible to researchers. This new architecture will make possible major scientific breakthroughs by enabling important applications that don’t scale well using clusters, with commodity interconnect technologies, access to a highly scalable system.

The Cray XT3 system was chosen because of its ability to deliver superior performance for parallel applications, including:

  • Scalable processing elements each with their own high performance AMD Opteron processors and memory
  • High bandwidth, low latency interconnect
  • MPP optimised operating system standards-based programming environment
  • Sophisticated Cray Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) and system management features
  • High speed, highly reliable Input/Output system

One of the key features of the Cray XT3 system is its interconnect, which incorporates a high bandwidth and low latency interconnect. The interconnect setup directly connects all processing elements in a XT3 system in a 3D torus topology, eliminating the cost and complexity of external switches. This will greatly improve reliability and allow systems to economically scale to tens of thousands of nodes well beyond the capacity of fat-tree switches.

Media references

For further information about the WASP facility and research
activities, please visit the website or contact Associate
Professor Karen Haines
on (61-8) 6488 8741.

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