Meet Australia’s New Supercomputer

Computer geeks around the world are now drooling over the recently launched supercomputer in Australia. Forget the supercomputers that you see in the movies or read about in the books. This one is the best of them all – at least according to the people behind the project.

The new supercomputer is known as the Vayu, and is the result of joint funding between the federal government, the CSIRO, and the Australian National University. The people who are in charge of operating and overseeing the Vayu, however, are from the National Computational Infrastructure.

So what is there to drool about? After all, just because a machine has been dubbed a supercomputer, it doesn’t mean that it’s THAT great, does it?

Let’s begin with this: the Vayu falls under the Sun Microsystems Constellation class. It has 11,936 processing cores – yes, THAT MANY. It’s not a SUPERcomputer for nothing. If you’re overwhelmed by the figure, just think of it as roundabouts 6,000 of your desktop PCs put together.

As for the memory, the Vayu has an impressive 36 terrabytes of RAM. That is about 18,000 times as much as the average PC at home has! The storage space, when formatted, is about 600 terrabytes. The unformatted state is 1 petabyte. Last, but definitely not the least, the Vayu can operate at 140 terraflops.

Impressed yet? Maybe the price of this big baby will take your breath away even more. From what I hear the Vayu costs AT LEAST $6 million. Whew.

Posted by noemi at 9:54 am under Features, General, News, Science