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Defence Science Technology’s (DST) John Taylor is on the hunt for a high-performance computing solution to support Defence’s key tactical and strategic objectives.
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There has been a massive uptake of HPC by universities and research organisations. It has become a tool of the trade and a way to deal with huge amounts of data and most areas of defence research will benefit from the new capability.
With confidence based on his experience of establishing and managing a HPC team at CSIRO, Taylor said, "Defence scientists will be able to run code thousands of times faster than on their high-end desktop computers. That means shortening the run-time for complex problems to realistic time frames, and tackling problems we couldn’t even dream of attempting on a desktop. High-performance computing offers are a whole range of advantages including accelerating the innovation cycle, which is critical to maintaining competitiveness."
DST is aiming for a top 50 spot in the list of the world’s 500 fastest computers. In November 2018, the IBM Summit supercomputer developed for the US Department of Energy was ranked number one, with a speed rating of 122.3 petaflops.
One petaflop is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second.
"Whether it’s modelling and simulation of a hypersonic object travelling through the atmosphere, or analysing the vast amounts of data from our modern weapon systems, data sets are now being described in petabytes, and will be rapidly expanding to collections and data sets measured in exabytes," Taylor added.
"Inside the top 50 is a suitable place for an organisation like DST to aim for. We’re aiming for 20 petaflops. To put that into context, we’ll be over 125 million times faster than the original Cray-1 supercomputer, which ran at 160 megaflops."
Taylor’s team has been operating a pilot high-performance computing capability at DST’s Melbourne site, with beta users helping to ramp up DST’s knowledge of how to operate a supercomputer in a secure environment, and just as importantly how to support and manage users efficiently.
He added, "Our HPC centre will play a key role in rapidly analysing huge volumes of data, being able to call on a significant number of the graphics processing units (GPUs) required by AI algorithms. Many of the programming interfaces will automatically pick up and use the GPUs, but we’ll also have a suite of libraries so researchers won’t have to completely rewrite existing code to access the benefits of the latest generation of high-performance computing hardware that GPUs represent."
Before you know it, high-performance computing power will be within the desktop reach of every Australian defence scientist.
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
