A new high-performance computing (HPC) cluster has been launched by CSIRO. It was created by Dell and is called Virga.Virga has been under development since November 2022, when a tender was released. In addition to Dell obtaining the project by July’s end of the previous year.
This system replaces the previous Dell-powered HPC known as Bracewell.
According to the science agency, Virga is named after the meteorological phenomenon where rain evaporates before reaching the ground. It highlights CSIRO’s extensive research into cloud and rain physics.
The Virga cluster is located at CDC’s Hume Data Centre in Canberra. It is built using Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers, equipped with Intel Xeon processors, NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per GPU, and NVIDIA Transformer Engine to enhance AI performance and capabilities, allowing for the training of large models in a matter of days or even hours, according to CSIRO.
Professor Elanor Huntington, CSIRO’s digital, national facilities and collections executive director, stated, “Virga will provide the critical computing infrastructure needed for machine learning and AI to grow Australia’s industry and economy.”
She added that AI is employed across almost all research fields at CSIRO, including the development of world-leading flexible printed solar panels, fire prediction, wheat crop measurement, and vaccine development, among others.
The new HPC will also support e-health research.
CSIRO Reveals High-Performance Computing Cluster ‘Virga’
