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Australia has officially added another supercomputer to the TOP500 list with the implementation of Virga. Officially operational in June 2024, Virga is the latest HPC system from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
According to the TOP500 ranking of June 2024, Virga has reached the 72nd position on the listBuilt on Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers and featuring Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory and 4th Powered by next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Virga was designed and built to optimize AI workflows.
Additionally, Virga is equipped with a Transformer Engine that dramatically accelerates AI performance and capabilities, enabling large models to be trained in days or even hours. The system also uses hybrid direct liquid cooling to reduce the need for power-intensive air cooling.
In a statement announcing the machineCSIRO’s executive director of national and digital facilities and collections, Professor Elanor Huntington, was excited about the machine’s future.
“AI is used in virtually every area of CSIRO’s research, such as developing advanced flexible printed solar panels, predicting wildfires, measuring wheat crops and developing vaccines, to name a few,” Huntington said. “High-performance computing systems like Virga also play an important role in CSIRO’s robotics and sensing work and are critical to the recently launched National Robotics Strategy to boost the competitiveness and productivity of Australian industry.”
Hosted at the CDC’s Hume Data Centre in Canberra, Virga is set to replace CSIRO’s previous HPC system, called Bracewell, which was powered by Dell. While Dell was initially contracted to build the system in 2023 with a bid of AU$14.5 million (US$9.65 million) in 2022, the system ultimately cost AU$16.3 million (US$10.85 million) to build.
While the system is intended for a wide variety of uses, Jason Dowling of CSIRO’s Australian Centre for eHealth Research said in the press release that Virga will be used frequently to solve medical problems. In particular, he believes the machines will enable researchers to train and validate new computational methods, helping healthcare professionals develop translational software in medical image analysis for classification, segmentation, reconstruction, registration, synthesis and automated image radiology.
Specifically, Dowling points out that Queensland Children’s Hospital will benefit greatly from this new machine. He says the machine will help train AI models to diagnose pathology from MRI scans of the lungs of children with cystic fibrosis.
The launch of Virga marks a significant milestone in Australia’s journey towards implementing AI tools within its HPC ecosystem. As Virga begins to tackle complex challenges across a range of scientific disciplines, from climate modelling to medical imaging, its impact is likely to extend well beyond the realm of pure research.