Ed. Note: This post was authored by Andrew Underwood, Manager, High Performance Computing (HPC), APJ, Dell
Today, we are announcing that Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), will be strengthening its position as Australia’s innovation catalyst, thanks to a new Dell High Performance Computing (HPC) System, named Pearcey.
Pearcey will drive a new era of big science that is transforming healthcare by analysing and modeling enormous amounts of data in order to implement clinical treatments that enhance individual and population health outcomes.
One CSIRO researcher benefiting from Pearcey is Dr. Dayalan Gunasegaram, a computational modeler who is using the new system for modeling work behind the development of an improved nylon mesh for use in pelvic organ prolapse (POP) surgery. This procedure has the potential to benefit the one in five Australian women that have surgery for the condition at some point in their lives.
The Pearcey system will also connect to the CSIRO Bowen Research Cloud, which is built on Dell PowerEdge technology, and provides CSIRO researchers with access to hundreds of flexible data and compute pools designed for collaborative research and multi-tenancy.
Built with future-ready in mind, the Pearcey system is powered by 246 Dell PowerEdge M630 compute blades, and four PowerEdge R930 high-memory servers that offer increased computational and data processing power. The system is tightly connected via an FDR InfiniBand network, and will leverage Bright Cluster Manager to provide a software defined approach to orchestrating the system. This delivers flexibility that allows the infrastructure to change, dependant on the scientific workload.
An example of this is the inclusion of a new ScaleMP software connected architecture running on 16 of the M630 blades, each with 512GB RAM. This software enables the CSIRO to create a single high memory cluster of 8 TB’s of memory and 320 cores under a single operating system, or break this memory into smaller clusters such as 4 x 2TB, 8 x 1TB etc. The CSIRO has not had this ability before to manage the size of memory allocated to research projects and is particularly important in the Bioinformatics and Life Sciences research streams.
You can learn more on CSIRO health blog.