New enhanced GPU capabilities will be fully operational by early 2020

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is pleased to officially announce the arrival of Topaz, a new commodity Linux cluster, provided by Xenon, which will be complementary to Zeus.

Topaz is currently undergoing final configuration and testing with the assistance of invited Pawsey researchers, and we anticipate Topaz to be in full production in January 2020.

Topaz is made up of 42 nodes, 20 for remote visualisation with the state-of-the-art Quadro NVIDIA GPUs and 22 for general-purpose computing with dual NVIDIA V100 GPUs.   GPUs are accelerators which provide huge amounts of compute power but require less electrical power to run in comparison to conventional CPUs.  Topaz will provide users with enhanced GPU capabilities, in particular, AI, computational work, machine learning workflows and data analytics.

Topaz will be suitable for jobs which can take advantage of the advanced GPU capabilities and latest generation InfiniBand infrastructure.

Once it is in production, projects with an active allocation on Magnus or for the GPU resources on Zeus will have access to Topaz. To find out how to login please visit Pawsey system documentation next year when Topaz information will be added.