Xenon Systems, a Melbourne-based IT provider of high-performance systems, has been awarded an $8.8 million contract with the National Computational Infrastructure to deliver a Lenovo NextScale high-performance compute system.
According to the NCI, the space efficiency offered by NextScale was key to the Xenon winning the competitive procurement, in addition to the provider’s competitive quote and ability to deliver the system in 2017 and support it subsequently. Xenon’s provision will deliver a 40 percent boost in computational power to the organisation.
The contract was funded with assistance from the Australian government through an annual National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy facilities fund. In addition to the NCI's $5.38 million NCRIS funding allocation for 2015/2016, a $7 million allocation from a priority Agility Fund was also released to the institution, in light of the necessity to upgrade the ageing compute facilities. This figure was then matched by the NCI's co-investing partner organisations
Xenon will deploy the Lenovo NextScale system as an extension of the NCI’s current peak facility, titled Raijin, and commissioned in 2013. It will install the entire system from rack and stack, cabling with the help of Mellanox engineers, to system launch, optimisation and testing as well as acceptance testing.
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