Australia's national science agency CSIRO has unveiled its Virga high-performance computing (HPC) cluster.
Housed at CDC's Hume data center in Canberra, the supercomputer is comprised of Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers containing Intel Xeon processors, Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per GPU, and a Nvidia Transformer Engine.
The cluster is cooled with hybrid direct liquid cooling to reduce the need for air cooling.
In a LinkedIn post, CDC said: "CDC is AI and Super-Compute Ready! CDC is incredibly proud to be hosting CSIRO's High-Performance computer (HPC) system, Virga in its Hume data center in Canberra."
The company added that this is an example of CDC's "expertise in closed loop and direct liquid cooling systems."
Dell was contracted to create the system in 2023 following an AU$14.5m (US$9.65m) tender in 2022, and replaces a previous Dell-powered HPC for CSIRO, called Bracewell. The system actually cost AU$16.3m (US$10.85m).
CSIRO is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and is an Australian Government Agency.
“Virga will provide the critical computing infrastructure needed for machine learning and AI to grow Australia’s industry and economy,” said CSIRO’s digital, national facilities and collections executive director, Professor Elanor Huntington.
“AI is used in practically all fields of research at CSIRO, such as developing world-leading flexible printed solar panels, predicting fires, measuring wheat crops, and developing vaccines, just to name a few.”
Dr. Jason Dowling from CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre added: “The new HPC facilities will allow researchers in our Australian e-Health Research Centre to train and validate new computational models, which will help us develop translational software in medical image analysis for image classification, segmentation, reconstruction, registration, synthesis, and automated radiology reporting.”
Dr. Dowling cited a project with the Queensland Children's Hospital that should benefit from Virga's ability to train artificial intelligence (AI) models to diagnose pathology from MRI scans of the lungs in children with cystic fibrosis.
The Virga cluster has been named after the "meteorological effect of rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground … in recognition of CSIRO’s decades of research into cloud and rain physics.”
CDC has two Hume data center campuses. Hume Campus One has 21MW of capacity and has three data centers, while Hume Campus Two has two data centers and a capacity of 51MW.
