The fastest super-computer in Australia — the Australian National University’s Raijin — is to be upgraded to become 10-times as powerful.
Due to go live in November and renamed Gadi meaning “to search for” in the Canberra region’s traditional Ngunnawal owners’ language, the upgrade of the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has been made possible with $70 million in Federal funding under The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.
Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU), Brian Schmidt said the upgrade would power some of Australia’s most crucial research.
“NCI plays a pivotal role in the national research landscape, and the super-computer is the centrepiece of this important work,” Professor Schmidt said.
“Investing in Australia’s research is an investment in our future.”
He said Gadi would give researchers the tools to unlock the mysteries of the universe, predict and manage natural disasters, advance cancer research and design new materials for future technologies.
“As the nature and complexity of the problems that need super-computers have become even greater and more pressing, computational and data science has grown to meet the challenge,” Professor Schmidt said.
“This new machine will keep Australian research and the 5,000 researchers who use it at the cutting edge.
“It will help us get smarter with our big data. It will add even more brawn to the considerable brains already tapping into NCI.”
He said NCI Australia was the nation’s most highly-integrated, high-performance research computing environment.
Its key partner organisations included the ANU, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia.
