New super goes down under [UPDATED]

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Aussies throw another FLOPS on the barbie.

[See this link for the cross-cultural decoding of that reference.] Yesterday our man in Australia sent along a pointer to this article about the latest developments in Australia’s supercomputing infrastructure: a 3 PFLOPS an 800 TFLOPS super to be installed at the University of Melbourne

IBM logoThe laboratory is part of the $100m Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI), which was established in 2008 and funded in part by the Victorian Government.

As part of the partnership, IBM will provide a Blue Gene/P supercomputer, which can be configured to reach speeds in excess of 3 petaFLOPS (FLoating point Operations Per Second).

This machine is quite a leap from the current holder of the heavyweight title in Australia, a 140 TFLOPS Sun at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“Through the partnership, we will be better placed to fulfill the VLSCI’s mission to revolutionise computational drug discovery for diseases such as HIV-AIDS, hepatitis C, breast cancer, prostate cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy, and ultimately to provide personalised medical treatment based on inherited genetic makeup.”

[NOTE: This post has been updated following comments from Chris Samuel that the machine to be installed in 2012 will be 800 TFLOPS, not 3 PFLOPS as the article I cited states. Check out the video of the commissioning ceremony for more; start watching at 12:10 for the size of the machine. Also, the title was changed from “3 PFLOPS go down under” to correct the error.]

Comments

  1. Er, the stage 2 VLSCI machine in 2012 will be around 800 TFLops according to the announcement.

  2. Chris: thanks for the correction, and for the supporting emails. I appreciate the help getting it right!

  3. No worries John, you’ve done much better than most reports I’ve read about it! 😉