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Vote for us: We're slinging cash at supercomputers!

Australian election campaign features cash-for-cores promise

The government of the Australian State of Victoria has slung AU$6.65 million in the direction of the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLCSI), deeming the investment a vote-winner in upcoming elections .

The VLCSI, one of Australia's leading HPC facilities, is operated in collaboration with IBM and serves campuses of the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and LaTrobe University. Back in 2011, the Victorian government's auditor-general said among other things that IBM had an advantage over competitors because Big Blue had both an intimate knowledge of the requirements of the University of Melbourne, which championed the project, as well as input into the supercomputer's design.

However, since its opening in 2013, VLSCI has pushed ahead with HPC rollouts. Its latest, the 20 Tflop “Barcoo” machine, started pushing electrons in August of 2013 to feed its 70-node, 1,120-core Sandy Bridge iron.

VLSCI was created with $AU50 million of government funding commitments matched by the same from the private sector. Government funding was to end at the close of 2014, and the new funds provide a two-year extension, during which the organisation will be working to turn itself into a self-funded operation.

The facility's workloads centre around cancer genomics, biomedical imaging, agricultural sciences and personalised medicine.

The new funding secures the VLSCI's operations to “pursue a renewed focus on generating commercial opportunities and producing outcomes to grow Victoria's health and biotechnology industry”, technology minister Gordon Rich-Phillips said in the government's media release.

VLSCI continues to claim the crown as the “most powerful life sciences supercomputer facility in the world”.

Rich-Phillips also announced, without nominating a dollar-figure, that it would continue funding the Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus. ®

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