The National Computational Infrastructure (also known as NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research intensive universities and medical research institutes.
Access to computational resources is provided to funding partners as well as researchers awarded grants under the National Computing Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS).[1] [2]
The current director is Sean Smith.[3]
The NCI building is located on the ANU campus in Canberra and uses hot aisle containment and free cooling to cool their computers.[2]
As of June 2020, NCI operates two main high-performance computing installations, including:
NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.
NCI hosts multiple data sets that can be used on their computation systems including:
Research conducted or under way includes:
NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001.
In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration.
The below table is a comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.
| System specifications | Performance | Years active | Initial Top500 Rank | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Processor | Memory | Storage | Peak | Sustained (SPEC) | Introduced | Retired | ||
| Fujitsu VP100 | Vector | 64 MB | 0.15 GFLOPS | 1987 | 1992 | — | |||
| Fujitsu VP2200 | Vector | 512 MB | 27 GB | 1.25 GFLOPS | 1992 | 1996 | — | ||
| Fujitsu VPP | Vector/Scalar | 14 GB | 28 GFLOPS | 1996 | 2001 | 59 | |||
| SGI Power Challenge XL | 20 MIPS R10000 | 2 GB | 77 GB | 6.4 GFLOPS | — | ||||
| Compaq/HP Alphaserver (sc) | 512 DEC Alpha | 0.5 TB | 12 TB | 1 TFLOPS | 2,000 | 2001 | 2005 | 31 | |
| SGI Altix 3700 (ac) | 1,920 Intel Itanium | 5.5 TB | 100 TB | 14 TFLOPS | 21,000 | 2005 | 2009 | 26 | |
| SGI Altix XE (xe) | 1,248 Intel Xeon (Nehalem) | 2.5 TB | 90 TB | 14 TFLOPS | 12,000 | 2009 | 2013 | — | |
| Sun/Oracle Constellation (Vayu) | 11,936 Intel Xeon (Nehalem) | 37 TB | 800 TB | 140 TFLOPS | 240,000 | 2009 | 2013 | 35 | |
| Fujitsu Primergy (Raijin) | 57,472 Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge) | 160 TB | 12.5 PB | 1.195 PFLOPS | 1,600,000 | 2013 | 2019 | 24 | |
| Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 (Gadi) | 145,152 Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake) | 576 TB | 20 PB | 9.26 PFLOPS | 2020 | In use | 24 | ||
The Vayu computer cluster, the predecessor of Raijin, was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a Hindu god, the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.
Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010. Vayu had the following performance characteristics:[11]
The system comprised:[12]
Power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system was approx 605 kW, but all the power was intended to be from green energy sources.[13]
System software for the Vayu cluster includes:[12]
The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the centre and installation of Vayu.[14] Other participating organisations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine.[13] The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.[13] [14]