News and Events

TPAC Delivers UK eScience Review Report!

For the full report, please download the PDF here.

TPAC HPC Upgrade - August 2009

In January 2009 TPAC and UTAS undertook a major infrastructure project to upgrade the HPC facility. Its 3 year lease end date was fast approaching on September 1 2009. After consultation with vendors and end users TPAC/UTAS finally came to the decision to replace the existing HPC Whiteout.sf.utas.edu.au, an Itanium based SGI Altix 4700, with an SGI Altix ICE 8200 Xeon based cluster to be known as Katabatic.sf.utas.edu.au.

The decision to go to a Xeon based cluster opens up a much larger range of software to be supported on the system as major software vendors are dropping their support of the Itanium based architecture.

In that, UTAS has acquired a 512 Core Xeon based cluster, being made up of 128 cores of Harpertown based Xeons, and 384 cores of the new ultra fast Nehalem based Xeon CPUs. On top of the 4 fold CPU core count, the cluster has just over 1Tb of addressable memory across its 64 compute nodes.

On top of all that, we have also replaced the SAN infrastructure with new SGI IS220 SAN trays giving us 72Tb of RAW storage, and 18Tb of high speed SAS disk. Also, TPAC now has it’s own tape library in a 950 slot Spectra Logic T950 (LTO4 based) with a potential capacity of 1Peta byte of near line storage.

TPAC Digital Library on SourceForge!

You can now download your very own copy of the TPAC Digital Library Portal from SourceForge.net. Both the TPAC crawler and the Gridsphere portlet are available to download from subversion. The project homeage is now at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tpac-dlp. If you have any question about the software, feel free to send us an email on the sourceforge mailing lists.

TPAC THREDDS Data Server

TPAC has installed a THREDDS Data Server (TDS) to serve our public datasets. TDS serves data through OPeNDAP, Web Coverage Service (WCS), HTTP as well as publishing GridFTP URLs. The server is located at http://ngportal.sf.utas.edu.au/thredds/. Please note that WCS only supports regularly gridded datasets. Please make use of this new service and let us know what you think.

APAC Summer School in Computational Science

APAC Summer School in Computational Science
4th - 8th December, 2006
Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane

Applications are being sought for the APAC Summer School in Computational Sciences to be held at the Queensland University of Technology during the 4th-8th December 2006. The school is aimed primarily at postgraduate students and comprises one week of lectures and tutorials in computational science across the following five themes:

Numerical Solution of Ordinary Differential Equations
Professor Kevin Burrage and Dr. Roger Sidje, ACMC, the University of Queensland

The CSIRO Mk3L Climate System Model

CSIRO MK3L Climate System Model: Annual-mean precipitation (mm) - 40 year average.

TPAC has completed porting the CSIRO Mk3L climate system model to the APAC grid facilities.

This low-resolution version of the CSIRO Mk3 climate system model is suitable for studying climate variability and change on multi-millennial timescales. The model is computationally efficient, and portable across a wide range of computer architectures.

Digital Library Portal

Portal Front Page: This is the main entry point to the portal. All data sets are grouped into categories and this page provides a brief description of each category and lists the number of data sets available.

TPAC's digital library portal is now in full production.

The portal was developed on APAC Grid facilities. It provides an integrated web-based user interface to a wide range of online oceanographic and climate datasets, and displays them in a common and easy way navigate format. It allows users to search meta-data and other characteristics of data sets.