The OzSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne is integral to the operations of the GWDC.
The Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne has operated a supercomputing program since 1998. OzSTAR launched as the latest facility in 2018. As well as meeting the needs of Swinburne researchers it also operates as a national facility for the astronomy research community.
OzSTAR is one of the fastest supercomputers in Australia. It is a Petaflops facility which means it is capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations per second. OzSTAR comprises over 4,000 Intel Skylake X6140 processing cores, 230 NVIDIA P100 GPUs, a collective 25 Terabytes of system memory and access to over 6 Petabytes of storage on a lustre-zfs filesystem.
More information can be found at supercomputing.swin.edu.au
A key role of OzSTAR is to underpin the computational efforts of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) with 35% of the machine dedicated for OzGrav use through projects ranging from LIGO data processing to simulations of supernova explosions.
Through the GWDC we aim to expand on the capabilities offered to gravitational wave researchers by:
Enabling OzSTAR to become an official LIGO Tier 3 Data Centre with live streaming of gravitational wave data, access via the Open Science Grid (OSG) and LIGO authentication. Increasing the storage capacity to a minimum of 10 Petabytes. Providing GPU capabilities and associated code optimisation to enable more efficient processing of LIGO data and open up new areas of discovery.
Open OzStar