Hardware

TPAC operates a state-of-the-art computing facility that provides advanced computing tools and capabilities to its partners, industry and other organisations.

SGI Altix 4700 Supercomputer

The SGI Altix 4700 blade-based supercomputer supports globally addressable memory across multiple nodes, scaling to hundreds of Intel Itanium 2 sockets. The TPAC HPC system is configured with:

• 128 Itanium2 1.6 GHz processors, each with a 9 Mbyte cache;
• 320 Gigabytes (GB) of memory;
• SGI's NUMAlink4 interconnect between processor and memory to provide 3.2 GB bidirectional bandwidth per link, and < 2µs MPI latency;
• a total of 40 Terabytes (TB) of SGI TP9300 storage comprising 10 TB of fibre channel disks, and 30 TB of SATA disks;
• total peak speed of over 820 billion calculations per second (0.8 Tflops).

The operating system is based on SUSE SLES9 Linux with an enhanced Linux 2.6 kernel and SGI ProPack4.

StorageTek L700 Silo Tape Library

The L700 allows for seamless migration of data between disk and tape using SGI’s Data Migration Facility (DMF) product. The StorageTek silo at TPAC uses LTO2 and LTO4 tapes to provide a total capacity of over 150 TB of mirrored storage.

The TPAC computing facility is housed in a secure, modern, well-serviced machine-room at the University of Tasmania.