Oz's biggest iron slated for 2018 replacement

NCI gets AU$70 million to replace Raijin

Australia's National Computational Infrastructure is getting ready to open the wallet and buy AU$70 million worth of new iron.

The Raijin supercomputer is currently the NCI's flagship machine, but the ageing metal was commissioned in 2013 and is now near end-of-life.

Raijin is currently number 76 on the Top 500 supercomputer rankings, and in November 2017 an upgrade added IBM Power8 nodes to the existing Fujitsu and Lenovo nodes.

The NCI said most of the funding ($69.2 million) will be spent in 2017-2018, with another $800,000 for 2018-2019, when the new machine is due to be commissioned.

While it hasn't published the spec for its new HPC, the NCI hopes Raijin's replacement to land a top-25 spot, which in today's money would equate to an Rmax of better than 4,300 Tflops.

NCI's infrastructure is used by 40 universities, five national science agencies, three medical research institutes, and industrial partners. ®