Supercomputer boost to Australian research

The door to the petascale era is being opened for critical Australian research in climate change, the environment, and a host of other areas. This transformational change comes with ANU signing an agreement with Fujitsu to build and install a 1. Petaflop supercomputer-the most powerful computer in Australia and amongst the largest in the world-and capable of performing 170,000 calculations per second for each of the seven billion people on the planet. The new petascale supercomputer, to be installed at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at ANU, will have the computing power, memory and storage of about 30,000 dual-processor computers working in tandem. ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young said: "The new supercomputer will provide Australia with a much-needed capability to meet national challenges, particularly in areas of research where deeper insights rely upon higher performance computation. "ANU is pleased to be playing its national leadership role by building research infrastructure shaped to meet future challenges, and by fostering the intellectual capital upon which this much-needed capability rests. The development is particularly pleasing in that it extends the University's 25-year commitment to this national role," he said.