Victoria's Trifid supercomputer to hit 45.9 TFLOPS

A new supercomputer being installed by RMIT University, La Trobe University and the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) will be ready for use on 17 November.

A new supercomputer being installed by RMIT University, La Trobe University and the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) will be ready for use on 17 November.

The Trifid supercomputer, located at VPAC in Carlton South, will be capable of 45.9 trillion calculations per second, employing 180 nodes and with a 165 terabyte storage array.

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"Our significant investment in this joint HPC [high performance computing] facility will provide our researchers with a ten-fold capability increase that enables them to better understand the nature of proteins and complex materials for next generation solar cells, more effectively model medical radiation used in cancer treatments, and support the breadth of engineering applications," professor Heinz Schmidt, RMIT's eResearch director, said in a statement.

Professor Tim Brown, deputy vice-chancellor at La Trobe, said the university is looking to address global problems through the use of supercomputing.

"Linking disciplines and strong researchers will be a key, but these cross-disciplinary approaches often require the latest in computational power to explore the solutions and find the best. So infrastructure like this is a vital component in the La Trobe strategy," he said.

The Australian National University recently began performance testing Australia's most powerful supercomputer following a system build that began in mid-August.

Earth system and climate change scientists and researchers will be the first recipients of the supercomputer's 1.2 petaflops of processing power -- provided by 57,000 Intel-based cores -- when the machine goes into production by early 2013. Follow Stephanie McDonald on Twitter: @stephmcdonald0

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