Bureau of Meteorology and The Australian National University to get HPC boost that will position Australia at the forefront of international weather forecasting and climate modelling.

Sydney, Australia, 19 March 2009. Sun Microsystems today announced that the Bureau of Meteorology and The Australian National University (ANU) have selected it to implement two interoperable High-Performance Grid Computing (HPC) Sun Constellation Systems in a four-year deal worth more than $30 million. The deal will also produce the first major weather forecasting site in the world to implement an open source software stack.

Located at the Bureau in Melbourne and at ANU in Canberra, the HPC environments will include more than 2,500 Sun Blade(TM) server modules based on the next-generation Intel® Xeon® processor (code named Nehalem). These will underpin the Bureau’s operational, research, and development missions, and provide a peak computational facility for the Australian research community.

The full implementation will see more than 1,500 Sun Blade server nodes installed at ANU. This is part of a technology refresh driven by the computational needs of climate change and earth science research, along with rapidly growing demand in other areas of Australian research. More than 1,000 Sun Blade server modules will be implemented at the Bureau to support weather forecasting – including for cyclones and other severe weather and emergency management, such as the tsunami warning system.

The Bureau and ANU, along with the CSIRO and other Australian universities will collaborate through the interoperable HPC environments to develop and improve weather and climate forecasting models and applications, using the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. The Sun(TM) Constellation System will deliver improved speed and throughput for both organisations.

The technology refresh will facilitate a National Computational Infrastructure Initiative led by ANU and jointly funded by the Commonwealth National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, ANU and CSIRO.

"The new supercomputer, which has 12 times the capability of the present system, will ensure ongoing international competitiveness and provide a facility that will allow Australian researchers to increase the scope, ambition and impact of their research," said Director of National Computational Infrastructure, Professor Lindsay Botten.

Dr Ben Evans, Head of the ANU Supercomputing Facility that manages the ANU system, said, "The new system will be among the world’s top 30 High Performance Computing systems and has excellent expansion capability to meet Australia’s rapidly emerging needs, particularly as we implement the next generation of high resolution climate models that further our understanding of this complex natural system."

For the Bureau of Meteorology the new Sun Constellation System will enable an improvement in weather forecasting through enabling larger, more complex and accurate modelling. The Bureau will be able to deliver increasingly high-quality, timely and accurate forecasting to agriculture, air transport, fisheries, defence and industry.

Sun's new blade products have been designed to work seamlessly with an Infiniband fabric to deliver very high system performance. In order to meet the demanding performance and reliability requirements at the Bureau, Sun implemented a dual rail Infiniband solution, which offers multiple, independent, high-speed network connections on each blade to a fully non-blocking Infiniband fabric. The result is a high performance, redundant, and fault tolerant system architecture that is an ideal fit for executing the Bureau's compute intensive applications, which include the processing of large volumes of observational data ingested into the forecasting models. The Bureau will implement six racks of the extreme high-density blades in its new data centre.

As part of the new HPC environments, the Bureau and ANU will implement Sun’s HPC software stack Sun(TM) HPC software, Linux Edition, which simplifies the deployment of HPC clusters. This is achieved by providing a ready-made framework of software components that enable servers to run as an HPC cluster.

Like most research supercomputing facilities around the world, the ANU system continues to be built on an open source software and industry standard hardware platform. For both ANU and the Bureau, the flexibility that open source provides over proprietary software is a compelling reason to include it in the HPC infrastructure.

Phil Tannenbaum, Chief Information Officer at the Bureau of Meteorology said, "This implementation will position the Bureau as the world’s first major weather service to operate within an Open Source environment. It’s a move away from where we’ve traditionally been operating and we believe the Sun infrastructure will benefit our operational systems, as well as our research and development users. We anticipated moving to Open Source Supercomputing for the next generation, and are pleased to have the opportunity to adopt it in 2009."

Andrew Goodlace, Acting Managing Director, Sun ANZ, said, "Climate change and weather modelling are becoming increasingly important to Australia and Australian industry. It’s vital that Australia remains at the forefront of related research and development to meet this objective and be able to collaborate with the world’s leading centres of excellence in meteorology."

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

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