CSIRO selected XENON for their Supercomputing Upgrade.

XENON delivered Australia’s first Intel^® Xeon^® E5-2600 GPU HPC Cluster for scientific research advances.
CSIRO, one of the world’s largest and most diverse scientific organisations, has chosen XENON Systems, an Australian provider of high-performance computing solutions, to upgrade its GPU cluster based on the new Intel^® Xeon^® processor E5-2600 product family, to give its researchers significant productivity gains, help speed up scientific discovery and be more internationally competitive. XENON previously worked with CSIRO to deliver the world’s 11th greenest supercomputer in November 2010.

CSIRO went to tender and chose XENON on account of its ability to best meet highly specific technology requirements, while helping CSIRO to minimise its impact on the environment, remotely manage the system and extract the highest performance possible from its investment in scientific and engineering computational technology.

CSIRO’s head of Computational and Simulation Sciences, Dr John A Taylor, leads the CSIRO’s research team to develop new methodologies for analysing and exploiting large and complex data sets and data streams. The new GPU HPC cluster helps CSIRO scientists increase productivity by performing computations in a single morning that used to take weeks. It also helps them create considerable scientific opportunity by giving the ability to perform tasks that were once computationally infeasible.

“It’s incredibly exciting to work at the forefront of research and development, both from an Australian and global perspective,” said Dragan Dimitrovici, Managing Director at XENON Systems. “We’re proud to work with one of the world’s leading scientific research organisations and one of the world’s most innovative technology companies to deliver one of Australia’s first Intel^® Xeon^® Sandy Bridge projects and the most advanced GPU technology. When people say ‘leading edge and innovation’ – that’s exactly what we do.”

“Intel^® worked very closely with XENON Systems to provide the most innovative processor and platform in the market for this project. We are very pleased with the solution XENON Systems has offered CSIRO and are confident the Intel^® Xeon processor E5-2600 product family will deliver leadership performance, energy efficiency and scalability,” said Kamil Gurgen, Channel Platform Manager at Intel^®.

XENON’s brand new HPC Cluster solutions are optimised for performance, power, and density while offering substantial headroom for future upgrades. The all-new XENON Nitro G16 3GPU 1U Compute Node is based on the latest Intel^® architecture and powered by Intel’s new generation E5-2600 series Xeon “Sandy Bridge-EP” 8-core processors.

The prime factor in the GPU cluster upgrade for CSIRO is moving to the new Intel^® platform architecture, opening space for variety of latest and forthcoming GPU cards and enhancing a number of important capacities.

Higher GPU density – with up to 4 GPU cards per 1U of rack space

Effectively removing a current bottleneck by doubling I/O bandwidth to up to 8GT/s with the next generation PCIe 3.0 bus technology.

Significantly faster and more efficient CPU architecture with up to 8 cores and integrated quad-channel memory controller, providing an additional performance improvement, whilst lowering the power consumption.

Brand new FDR10 InfiniBand high-speed interconnect solution with high-efficiency data handling and utilising latest “GPUDirect” and “CORE-direct” technologies.

The new CSIRO GPU HPC Cluster is made of 134 Compute Nodes powered by 268 x Intel^® Xeon E5- 2650 processors (2144 CPU cores) and featuring 390 NVidia Tesla 2050 GPU cards (174,720 GPU cores).

For more information, please visit www.csiro.au, xenon.com.au and www.intel.com.

About CSIRO

CSIRO – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation – is Australia’s largest scientific research organisation and one of the largest and most diverse scientific organisations in the World.

CSIRO delivers great science and innovative solutions for industry, society and the environment. Working from sites across the nation and around the globe, CSIRO’s 6,500 staff are focused on providing new ways to improve the quality of life, as well as the economic and social performance of a number of industry sectors through research and development.

Further information about CSIRO can be found at www.csiro.au.

About XENON Systems

XENON is an Australian leader in HPC solutions. It focuses on providing tailored and innovative IT solutions to our clients that will enhance their business activities by delivering superior: high performance computing, server, storage and visual workstation technology. Its product portfolio is embraced by scientific, technical and creative communities to solve challenging data intensive computing and visualisation problems.

XENON partners with NVIDIA, Intel^®, Microsoft, DDN and Panasas among others. Further information about XENON can be found at the About Us page. 

About Intel^®

Intel^® (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel^® is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.

Intel^® is a trademark of Intel^® Corporation in the United States and other countries.

For further information, please contact XENON.