One year after launching its Nimbus cloud service, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia has now expanded with NVIDIA GPU nodes. The GPUs are currently being installed, so the Pawsey cloud team have begun a Call for Early Adopters.
Launched in mid-2017 as a free cloud service for researchers who require flexible access to high-performance computing resources, Nimbus consists of AMD Opteron CPUs making up 3000 cores and 288 terabytes of storage. Now, Pawsey will be expanding its cloud infrastructure from purely a CPU based system to include GPUs; providing a new set of functionalities for researchers.
The expansion includes 6 x HPE SX40 nodes which each contain 2 x NVIDIA Tesla V100 16GB GPUs. These bad boys are built to accelerate Artificial Intelligence, HPC, and graphics. Powered by NVIDIA Volta architecture, they offer the performance of up to 100 CPUs in a single GPU.
With GPUs online, Pawsey is now playing in the same leagues as Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, who have recently announced their cloud expansion using the same NVIDIA GPUs. One of the differences between these key cloud players and Pawsey are that the services offered at the Centre are FREE to Australian researchers. That means if you or your project have any affiliation with an Australian university, research body or government facility, you can access it at no cost.
Pawsey are seeking researchers to be early adopters of the expanded system. This access aims to provide user time on the system to experiment and aid Pawsey in validating and optimizing it in preparation for production use. The Nimbus Early Adopter process will run until August 2018, however this schedule may vary depending on the duration of commissioning and acceptance testing. To be eligible as an early adopter, users may nominate a project capable of using GPU cores with an existing library/tool or CUDA based code.
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