Swinburne supercomputer lights up

Swinburne Unversity has taken the covers off its newest supercomputer, dubbed Ngarrgu Tindebeek (“knowledge of the void” in the local Woiwurrung language), after more than a year’s work.

Professor Matthew Bailes with Ngarrgu Tindebeek
Swinburne University

The $5.2 million project was first announced in February 2022.

As part of the university’s OzSTAR facility, Ngarrgu Tindebeek’s focus will be space research, along with medicine and environmental research.

The HPC machine will have more than 11,500 CPU cores and 88 GPUs, with 160 standard compute nodes, 10 high-memory compute nodes, and 22 GPU compute nodes.

The standard nodes will each feature two 32-core AMD EPYC 7543 CPUs, 250 GB of RAM, and 2 TB of NVMe SSD storage.

High-memory nodes have the same CPU spec, but each node will have 1024 GB of RAM.

The GPU nodes will each feature four NVIDIA A100 GPUs, with 512 or 1024 GB of RAM. NVIDIA Quantum-2 NDR InfiniBand switches will provide 200 Gbps interconnect.

Ngarrgu Tindebeek will run alongside the older 4140 core, 230 GPU OzSTAR machine, with Swinburne’s oldest supercomputer, the Green II cluster, now decommissioned.

“This supercomputer is designed specifically to help researchers facing massive data sets – like astronomers or neuroscientists," Data Science Research Institute director, Professor Matthew Bailes, 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."

The supercomputer will be available to all Victorian universities, supporting 50 researchers, and it will be used by more than 250 students “from high school to PhD level”, the university said.

Ngarrgu Tindebeek's $5.2 million price tag was picked up by the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund.

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

Ongoing operations will come from the National Collaborative Research Investment Scheme.