MEDIA RELEASE

Embargoed until 8am, Thursday 23 December 1999

Boost for Australia's premier supercomputer

The Bureau of Meteorology/CSIRO supercomputer is being upgraded to cater for the development of higher-resolution mathematical models of weather systems and complex molecular structures, it was announced today.

The partnership's NEC SX-4 supercomputer, now at full capacity, will be replaced by NEC's latest generation of high-speed vector processors, the SX-5 (pictured below), which will run models of the atmosphere and molecular structures in far greater detail than before.

The SX-5 - the most powerful unclassified supercomputer in Australia - was delivered to the Bureau/CSIRO High Performance Computing and Communications Centre (HPCCC) earlier this week. The centre in Melbourne ranks in the top 100 supercomputer sites in the world.

Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO applications will be moved across to the SX-5 some time in the new year, and the SX-4 will be returned to NEC Australia.

HPCCC manager Steve Munro said today that in terms of computing capacity and model development, the upgrade put the Bureau within reach of major overseas weather centres, such as the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.

He said the new installation - the third phase of a 1997 agreement between the HPCCC and NEC - would enable the two scientific organisations to "continue their planned growth paths in high-performance computing".

Mr Munro said the most significant improvement was the boost in memory. The SX-5's main memory of 128 gigabytes is 16 times bigger than the SX-4's. "This memory is an enormous resource, allowing large problems to be modelled in fine detail, such as regional weather forecasting models and complex molecular structures," he said.

"The SX-5 can do in an hour what a high-end personal computer would take weeks or months to do," he said, "but some problems are so big the PC just could not do them at all."

The SX-5 will also run more detailed weather prediction models of tropical cyclones, cold fronts, and climate variability, with their associated atmosphere-ocean interactions. And it would run air quality and pollution dispersion models more effectively, Mr Munro said.

HPCCC Deputy Manager Dr Robert Bell said the CSIRO had used the power of the SX-4 to advance Australian science in areas as diverse as physical processes at the molecular level, long-term climate change, regional impacts of climate change, mining exploration, power station efficiency and mineral processing.

General Manager of NEC's High Performance Computing Systems in Australia, Hideo Taima, said NEC was pleased to continue its association with the Bureau and CSIRO. "We are pleased that NEC products are being used to assist the advancement of Australian science. This latest upgrade shows that the shared-memory, parallel-vector architecture of the SX series of supercomputers continues to be the most effective tool for the modelling of a wide range of physical phenomena."

Mr Taima said NEC's SX series of vector supercomputers was widely used in Europe, Asia and parts of North America by industry and government. The series was used for applications where detailed modelling of physical or chemical processes was required. The SX-5 was the latest and most powerful supercomputer in the SX series, he said.

Technical information

The SX-5 series is a family of parallel vector supercomputer systems that range in performance from eight gigaflops to four teraflops. The single-node, A-model chassis supports eight to 16 processors, up to 128 gigabytes of memory and a maximum memory bandwidth of one terabyte a second. Multiple nodes can be connected to provide a maximum of four teraflops and four terabytes.

Each node supports uniform, physically-shared memory.

Multi-node configurations utilise NUMA architecture.

All models are based on CMOS technology and are fully air cooled.

Each processor, or CPU, has a peak capacity of eight gigaflops.

Each processor, or CPU, contains a vector unit, a scalar unit complete with on-chip cache, and a memory interface.

Vector unit
The eight-gigaflop processor is designed to provide high performance for applications that are well vectorized and have longer vector lengths, such as weather and climate modelling, seismic processing, molecular simulations and similar fields.

The eight-gigaflop vector unit includes 16 vector pipeline sets, each of which has add/shift, multiply, divide and logical pipes. Each set of 16 pipes services a single vector instruction, and all sets of pipes can operate concurrently. With a vector-add and vector-multiply operating concurrently, the pipes provide eight gigaflops peak performance.

The SX Series Super-UX operating system is a System V port with additional features from SVR4.2MP, plus additional enhancements to support supercomputing requirements.

The SX-5 delivered to the HPCCC is a single-node, A-model chassis, with 13 processors (eight gigaflops/processor) and 128 gigabytes of memory.

(Ends)

Further information:

HPCCC: Steve Munro, Manager, tel (03) 9669 8101, mobile 0417 515 813, e-mail: s.munro@bom.gov.au
CSIRO: Dr Robert Bell, tel (03) 9669 8102, mobile 0428 108 333, e-mail: robert.bell@hpc.csiro.au
NEC: Chris Collins, tel (02) 9930 2564, e-mail: CHRIS.COLLINS@nec.com.au

Web links:
HPCCC site

The NEC SX-5: The most powerful unclassified supercomputer in Australia.
A higher resolution copy of this image is available to the media by contacting the Public Affairs Unit of the Bureau of Meteorology, tel: (03) 9669 4552, fax: (03) 9669 4113, e-mail: pro@bom.gov.au
Photographs of the SX-5 installation can also be arranged by contacting Steve Munro or Rob Bell (contact details above).