OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu announces Australia’s most powerful computer was officially launched today at the opening of the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) high performance computing centre at the Australian National University (ANU).

The 1.2 Petaflop Fujitsu PRIMERGY cluster, is named after the Japanese god of thunder and rain, Raijin. It is one of the most powerful in the world and now provides high-end computational services to the Australian research community. With peak performance speeds of 1.2 PetaFlops – 1,200,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second, the new computer has the power of 56,000 computers working in parallel, and the disk storage equivalent of 20,000 computers but working much faster. It can perform the same number of calculations in one hour that every one of the 7 billion humans on Earth, armed with calculators, could perform in 20 years - or 170,000 calculations per second, per person on Earth.

The NCI is supported by a \\$50 million grant under the Australian Government’s Super Science Initiative. Raijin’s speed is taking the Australia’s research capacity to new levels with Commonwealth agencies such as the Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia to run complex weather and climate modelling, and research in computational chemistry, particle physics, astronomy, material science, microbiology, nanotechnology and photonics.

Raijin is the largest x86 HPC installation of any brand in the southern hemisphere and the largest Fujitsu PRIMERGY deployment worldwide. The innovative design of Raijin, which utilises industry standard hardware, saw it delivered and commissioned as budgeted.