CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) has chosen Dell as the vendor to replace its aging Bracewell cluster. Last November, CSIRO issued a $14.5 million tender for the project. The new Advanced Scientific Accelerator Cluster (ASAC) is designed to support machine learning, artificial intelligence workloads, and traditional high-performance computing (HPC) tasks.
The cost of the ASAC has exceeded the original tender budget, amounting to nearly $16.3 million, according to the contract notice on July 21. The new machine will incorporate hybrid direct liquid cooling technology.
The installation of the ASAC will take place in 14 racks at the Canberra Data Centres facility, starting in September, and it is expected to be available to researchers by December 2023. The system will feature a high-performance interconnect, out-of-band management for all system nodes, cluster management and monitoring tools, and a comprehensive application development environment, as stated in the original tender request.
