National Computational Infrastructure


The National Computational Infrastructure is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, 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.
The current director is Professor Sean Smith.

Computer systems

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.

Research

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, 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 ProcessorMemoryStoragePeak Perf.Sustained Perf. Initial
Top500
Rank
1987–92
Fujitsu VP100		Vector64 MByte0.15 GFlops
1992–96
Fujitsu VP2200		Vector512 MByte27 GByte1.25 GFlops
1996–2001
Fujitsu VPP		Vector/
Scalar		14 GByte28 GFlops59
SGI Power Challenge XL20
MIPS R10000		2 GByte77 GByte6.4 GFlops
2001–05
Compaq/HP Alphaserver
512
DEC Alpha		0.5 TByte12TByte1 TFlop2,00031
2005–09
SGI Altix 3700
1920
Intel Itanium		5.5 TByte100 TByte14 TFlop21,00026
2009–13
SGI Altix XE
1248
Intel Xeon 		2.5 TByte90 TByte14 TFlop12,000—
2009–13
Sun/Oracle Constellation 		11,936
Intel Xeon
37 TByte800 TByte140 TFlop240,00035
2013–2019
Fujitsu Primergy 		57,472
Intel Xeon 		160 TByte12.5 PByte1195 TFlop1,600,00024
2020–Present
Fujitsu Primergy CX2570 		145152
Intel Xeon 		576 TByte20 PByte9260 TFlop24