computer science

National Computational Infrastructure

National Computational Infrastructure is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand National Computational Infrastructure rather than just read about it. In short: The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSI…

Key takeaways

National Computational Infrastructure belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect National Computational Infrastructure to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of National Computational Infrastructure from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research-intensive universities and medical research institutes. Access to computational resources is provided to funding partners as well as researchers awarded grants under the National Computing Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS). The current director is Andrew Rohl.

Notable staff Lindsay Botten – former director Chris Pigram – former CEO of Geoscience Australia and acting director after the retirement of Lindsay Botten. Sean Smith – former director Andrew Rohl - current director

Facility The NCI building is located on the ANU campus in Canberra and uses hot aisle containment and free cooling to cool their computers.

Computer systems As of June 2020, NCI operates two main high-performance computing installations, including:

Gadi, meaning 'to search for' in the local Ngunnawal language. a 9.26 PetaFLOP high-performance distributed memory cluster consisting of: 145,152 cores (Intel Xeon Scalable 'Cascade Lake' processors) across 3024 nodes 160 nodes containing four Nvidia V100 GPUs 567 Terabytes of main memory 20 Petabytes of fast storage 47 Petabytes of storage for large data files 50 Petabytes of tape storage for archival HDR Mellanox Infiniband in Dragonfly+ topology (up to 200 Gbit/s transfer) Tenjin, a 67 TeraFLOP bespoke high-performance partner cloud, consisting of: 1600 Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge cores 25 Terabytes of main memory 160 Terabytes State Disk

Data services and storage NCI operates the fastest filesystems in the Southern Hemisphere. 20 Petabytes of storage is available for fast I/O, 47 Petabytes is available for large data and research files, and 50 Petabytes is available on tape for archival.

Datasets NCI hosts multiple data sets that can be used on their computation systems including:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Archive (ATSIDA) which provides Australian Indigenous research data Australian Astronomy Optical Data Repository (ODR) including: Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) current and selected historical datasets Southern Sky Survey, using the ANU's robotic SkyMapper telescope at Mount Stromlo Observatory Australian National Geophysical Collection (300 TB in 2015) including: Airborne geophysics data Gravity data set Seismic survey High-resolution 'raw' Indian Ocean sea floor data was generated as part of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Research Research conducted or underway includes:

Southern Sky Survey, using the ANU's robotic SkyMapper telescope at Mount Stromlo Observatory The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) COVID-19 mitigation research Medical and materials research

History NCI Australia is a direct descendant of the ANU Supercomputing Facility ANUSF, which existed from 1987 through to 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, the Australian Government pushed ahead with a process to form the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), the foundation of which would be built around a new national computational infrastructure. With its heritage in supercomputing, it was decided that the APAC National Facility would be located at The Australian National University, with the facility ultimately commissioned in 2001. In 2007, APAC began its evolution into the present NCI collaboration. The table below provides comprehensive history of supercomputer specifications present at the NCI and its antecedents.

Vayu The Vayu computer cluster, the predecessor of Raijin, was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a Hindu god, the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr, after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18. Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one-eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010. Vayu had the following performance characteristics:

Peak performance: 140 TFLOPS Sustained: 250K SPECfp rate Resources: 110M hrs p.a. The system comprised:

11936 CPUs in 1,492 nodes in Sun X6275 blades, each containing two quad-core 2.93 GHz Intel Nehalem CPUs 24Gbyte DDR3-1333 memory 24 GB Flash DIMM for swap and job scratch total: 36.9 TB of RAM on compute nodes Dual socket, quad-core Sun X4170, X4270, X4275 servers for Lustre fileserving approx 835 TB of global user storage The power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system was approx 605 kW, but all the power was intended to be from green energy sources. System software for the Vayu cluster includes:

CentOS 5.4 Linux distribution (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4) the oneSIS cluster software management system the Lustre cluster file system the National Facility's variant of the OpenPBS batch queuing system The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the center and installation of Vayu. Other participating organizations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine. The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government, made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with National Computational Infrastructure

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what National Computational Infrastructure claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to National Computational Infrastructure before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about National Computational Infrastructure ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of National Computational Infrastructure

In research: National Computational Infrastructure appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses National Computational Infrastructure in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: National Computational Infrastructure is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2000s establishments in Australia, Computer science research organizations, Research institutes in Australia, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for National Computational Infrastructure outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study National Computational Infrastructure in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what National Computational Infrastructure means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain National Computational Infrastructure out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is National Computational Infrastructure in simple terms?

Why does National Computational Infrastructure matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study National Computational Infrastructure?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on National Computational Infrastructure.