By February 2023, it will be prepared to onboard its first user communities and begin full operations.
Since Phase 1 of the project went online in June, the centre has finished removing the former flagship, Magnus, and has been “filling out that space with Setonix,” according to Pawsey’s executive director Mark Stickells in an interview with iTnews.
Stickells stated that there is still some under-floor work to be done as well as “a couple of months” of tuning and optimization work.
The ASKAP radio telescope, which is Pawsey’s primary community, will initiate onboarding first. Other initiatives like bioinformatics and climate science will soon follow.
Stickells claimed that while the Setonix project appears to be a technological update, it is also a renewal of people and processes since researchers will need assistance to fully and effectively utilise Setonix’s architecture.
The Australian research community has been busy getting ready for Setonix and its new heterogeneous architecture, which combines CPUs and GPUs to create a GPU-heavy environment, he said.
Beyond the objective measure of efficiency, 56Gflops per watt, which placed Setonix in fourth place on the international Green500 list, CTO Ugo Varetto stated that efficiency requires software that is aligned with architecture.
Therefore, you won’t need to resort to devious means to cause asynchronous memory transfers between components. Two types (CPU and GPU) will be able to access the same memory through a single layer of memory.
According to Varetto, the other architectural advancement is the optimization of memory transfer.
He continued, pointing out that moving data quickly enough is currently the key challenge facing both HPC and commercial data centres.
In terms of data visualisation, you spend 85% of your time reading the data and just 15% of your time visualising it.
Storage suppliers are collaborating with centres like Pawsey to figure out how to solve this issue and “bring the data closer to the CPU, the GPU, and the compute units.”
