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More big boxen for boffins

CSIRO seeks more metal

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation – CSIRO to you and I – has gone to market for an upgrade to a 64-processor system in Canberra.

The Sandy Bridge upgrade to support “future processor architectures” will also have to support PCI-e 3.0 with 40 lanes per CPU socket. Each node will have a minimum of 500 GB local storage, two gigabit Ethernet connections (one for a dedicated management network), Infiniband support, and the ability to run either Windows HPC Server or Sues Linux Enterprise Server 11.

The proposed system is to go live in March 2012.

The tender also notes CSIRO’s desire to reduce power footprint, saying that a core requirement is to reduce the power/compute ratio of its system.

The research body recently went live with a 96-node cluster of dual six-core Intel Westmere CPUs running Linux, with 50 TB of global storage.

The new system will be installed in a CSIRO facility within Canberra Data Centre.

The science agency is also a driving force in Australia’s bid for the Square Kilometer Array, and the resulting expansion in high-performance computing in Western Australia.

An industry source told The Register that the first draft of the tender documents specifically identified Sandy Bridge support as a key consideration in the tender; however, this reference was later removed from the tender.

The tender is open until the November 22. ®

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