Cray HPC to Be Installed at Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Altair Engineering, Inc. announced that its workload management for HPC, PBS Professional, has been chosen to manage workload for the new Cray supercomputing system to be installed at the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM), Australia’s national weather, climate and water agency.

PBS Professional was selected as part of a Cray contract to provide BoM with a Cray XC40 supercomputer and Cray Sonexion 2000 storage system. Altair is collaborating with BoM to streamline the transition process from its previous job scheduler.

The supercomputer will upgrade BoM’s capability to deliver more precise forecasts with greater accuracy and frequency; with a 16x increase in compute capacity, the system is expected to run nearly eight times as many daily forecasts than the current system, with up to 5x improvement in model resolution.

BoM’s expertise and services assist Australians in preparing for the harsh realities of their natural environment, including drought, floods, fires, storms, tsunami and tropical cyclones. Through regular forecasts, warnings, monitoring and advice spanning the Australian region and Antarctic territory, the BoM provides one of the most fundamental and widely-used services of government.

At 1.6 petaflop performance with plans to increase past 5 petaflops, the Cray-Altair solution will take a main position in supercomputing in Australia; it will exceed the performance of the 1.2 petaflop Raijin system at the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI), another Altair PBS Professional-user. BoM’s initial Cray XC40 supercomputer will be comprised of 2,160 compute nodes with 51,840 Intel Haswell Xeon cores, 276TB of RAM and usable storage of 4.3PB.

“We are honored to be providing BoM with a highly advanced Cray supercomputing solution, which will ensure the Australian people have the most accurate and timely weather and climate information,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s SVP and chief strategy officer. “This delivery demonstrates Cray and Altair’s leadership in providing innovative and productive HPC systems for the global operational weather and climate community.“

Used by thousands of companies worldwide, PBS Professional enables engineers in HPC environments to improve productivity, optimize resource utilization and efficiency, and simplify the process of cluster workload management.

“With PBS Professional now running the top two systems in Australia, as well as many other top weather systems around the globe, Altair solidifies our leadership as the HPC workload management provider of choice for massive-scale machines running critical, complex workloads,” said James Scapa, CEO, Altair. “We look forward to working with BOM and Cray to deploy and maintain this landmark system.“