Fujitsu Selected for Australia’s National Computational Project

Fujitsu Ltd announces its
selection to deliver and install a new supercomputer, as well as to establish a
collaboration with the Australian National
University‘s (ANU) National Computational
Infrastructure (NCI)(1) to provide high-end computational services to the
Australian research community.

The new x86 cluster-type supercomputer based on Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers will
be deployed in a new datacentre in Canberra, Australia starting in mid-December
2012, with handover set to be completed in early 2013.

In addition to delivery and installation, the contract calls for
collaboration on a number of research projects, particularly to
weather and climate modeling.

The new supercomputer has a theoretical performance of 1.2 petaflops
and a storage capacity of 12PB. It is based on x86 cluster technology and
consists of 50 racks containing 3592 PRIMERGY CX250 compute nodes equipped with
7184 CPUs in 898 PRIMERGY CX400 chassis.

Fujitsu elected to bid its PRIMERGY x86 technology to meet the ANU’s
stringent performance, efficiency, and benchmarking requirements. The HPC design is based on industrial standard hardware, which will
deliver improved price performance; access to a greater range of independent
software vendor applications; and simplify the migration process of existing
x86 applications.

The ANU and Fujitsu will jointly pursue various projects in
computational science including weather, climate, disaster prevention and
advanced use of supercomputing. This research, scheduled to extend over four
years, will utilize the Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, which improves
upon Fujitsu’s supercomputer technology employed in the world’s fastest supercomputer,
the K computer as well as the new x86 cluster-type supercomputer. Combining
the supercomputing technologies offered by Fujitsu together with the advanced
application expertise provided by Australian researchers will, it is
anticipated, lead to the development of an even higher-performing
supercomputing environment.

Commenting on the role of the new supercomputer, ANU vice-chancellor
professor Ian Young said: "The new
supercomputer will provide Australia with a much needed capability to meet national
challenges. It will take Australia’s research to new levels in areas such as
weather and climate modeling, computational chemistry, particle physics,
astronomy, material science, microbiology, nanotechnology and photonics."

Mike Foster, CEO of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand said: "Once completed, the NCI Supercomputer will
be one of the largest and fastest computers in the world. This win confirms
Fujitsu’s ability to leverage its global resources to complement its strong
capability in cloud services, application development and managed services at a
local level. We are proud to be able to assist the ANU and NCI in playing its
vital role as one of the leaders in Australian research."

Masahiko Yamada, president of Fujitsu’s Technical Computing Solutions
Unit commented: "Fujitsu’s objective
is to contribute to a prosperous future through the benefits of supercomputers.
In order to accomplish this, we need the collaboration of other researchers and
scientists worldwide. This is why we are so excited to deliver our HPC
offerings and to work with the ANU on the NCI project. This collaboration
should produce results in climate modeling and other fields that benefit
Australia and the world."

(1) NCI:  NCI is part of ANU and is jointly funded by
the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research under its
National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) program; the
CSIRO; Bureau of Meteorology; Geoscience Australia; and the ANU.