Swinburne Launches New GPU-Accelerated Supercomputer

Swinburne University of Technology officially launched one of the most powerful supercomputers in Australia to help unlock the secrets of the Universe.
Powered by Dell EMC, the $4 million OzSTAR supercomputer is equipped with 230 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs and will reach a performance peak of 1.2 petaflops. The Swinburne-based Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery’s (OzGrav) will use the system to search for gravitational waves and study the extreme physics of black holes and warped space-time.
OzGrav Director, Professor Matthew Bailes, says OzSTAR will be used to shift through reams of data and be powerful enough to search for coalescing black holes and neutron stars in real time.
“In one second, OzSTAR can perform 10,000 calculations for every one of the 100 billion starts in our galaxy,” says Professor Bailes. The supercomputer will also be used to tackle future data science challenges such as machine learning, deep learning, database interrogation and visualization.

The supercomputer was given a custom paint job of gas swirling around two black holes that was designed by Swinburne graduate Justin Pedler and visual arts agency Apparition Media.
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