Swinburne University launches $5.2m AMD EPYC-powered supercomputer

Swinburne University of Technology has launched its $5.2 million supercomputer aimed to support its space technology, medicine and environmental research.

Named Ngarrgu Tindebeek the supercomputer is based on AMD’s EPYC CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs.

It features 11,648 CPU cores and 88 GPUs and has 160 standard compute nodes, 10 high-memory compute nodes and 22 GPU compute nodes.

The funding was from the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund (VHESIF) in 2022 and the name was from Wurundjeri elders through the assistance of the Moondani Toombadool Centre.

Ngarrgu Tindebeek translates as “Knowledge of the Void” in the local Woiwurrung language.

It will be operated at the OzStar centre, together with an older 4140 general purpose computing cores and 230 GPUs machine.

Meanwhile, Swinburne’s oldest supercomputer, the Green II cluster, is now decommissioned.

Swinburne said some of the applications include forming a better understanding of the mysteries of space including gravitational waves, black holes and galaxy formation; cerebral operation through analysis of brain data; and earth observation data generated from satellites and other ecosystem analysis.

“What used to take researchers and students weeks or months to achieve on their desktops, can now be done in a matter of hours,” Swinburne Data Science Research Institute director Matthew Bailes said.

Bailes said the supercomputer is designed specifically to help researchers facing massive data sets – like astronomers or neuroscientists - to make groundbreaking discoveries.

"This already makes it such a sought-after machine from scientists in Australia and around the world," he said.

“Excitingly, it could help us become the first people to convincingly detect gravitational waves from super massive black holes by performing trillions of calculations every second for weeks."

Ngarrgu Tindebeek will be available to all Victorian universities on collaborative research projects.

Swinburne expects the program of work will support 50 researchers, and be used by some 250 students from high school to PhD level.

The facility will be supported by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL) and in partnership with Victoria University (VU) and Federation University Australia (FUA).

Support for the ongoing operations of the Swinburne supercomputing environment comes from the National Collaborative Research Investment Scheme (NCRIS).