Gallery: Raijin, NCI’s Petaflop Supercomputer

Raijin is the supercomputer run by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and used for a wide range of scientific research projects. Here’s an inside look at the computing and cooling gear that drives it.

Lifehacker took a media tour of NCI last week as part of an event to celebrate NetApp signing up to provide high performance and flash storage technology to NCI. 11 petabytes of storage will be added to NCI’s infrastructure, giving it 44 petabytes in total.

NCI’s headquarters host Raijin, which runs on 54,472 Fujitsu primary cores and has a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops. Also on offer is a high capacity file system (Lustre), which includes 7.6 petabytes of flash storage and 18.4 petabytes of project storage, along with a 20 petabyte tape array; and a research cloud running on 3200 Dell cores with 25TB of memory.

As well as running the most powerful supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, NCI has one of the tidiest data rooms we’ve ever seen. All the spares are neatly boxed and sorted, and the cable management is a joy to behold. Also evident: many, many warning signs.

And then there’s the cooling system, including 60,000 and 30,000 litre storage tanks, and the high-performance UPS, which can fire instantly onto a battery and then fully power up the back-up generator within 26 seconds.





































Disclosure: Angus Kidman travelled to Canberra as a guest of NetApp.


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