The Australian National University in Canberra has just signed an agreement with Japanese ICT and electronics manufacturer Fujitsu to build Australia's fastest supercomputer, performing at 1.2 petaflops. And believe us, that's actually a lot of flops.
The new computer, will become fully operational by January next year, will have approximately the same processing capabilities as about 56,000 regular old desktop PCs wired in tandem.
"Research in climate modelling, advanced materials, astronomy and medicine is critically dependent on high performance computational modelling and data analysis, and researchers in these areas are among the outstanding teams poised to benefit from the new facility as soon as NCI can make it available later this year,” said Professor Lindsay Botten, Director of ANU's National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) centre, in a press release.
To deal with the 170,000 calculations per second the machine will be making, it will also come with a hefty 12 petabytes of storage. This isn't your grandpa's supercomputer we're talking about here.
The whole set up, the result of a wider ranging partnership between ANU and other unis, Fujitsu, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Federal Government, will cost around $100 million to put together, with about half of that coming from the Federal Super Science initiative, according to Computerworld.
