NVIDIA is collaborating with Monash University and providing powerful computing capabilities to accelerate research and development programs to accelerate academic and industry innovation in Australia.
Monash University will join the NVIDIA Technology Centre Asia Pacific, which is committed to driving research and development work in the region.
Under this program, NVIDIA and the university will jointly fund research students, and provide access to GPU-accelerated computing technologies, as well as provide industry-relevant training and knowledge exchange.
A core part of this collaboration between NVIDIA and Monash University is the M3 supercomputer, the third-generation supercomputer available through the MASSIVE (Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment) facility.
In collaboration with the CSIRO and the Australian Synchrotron, MASSIVE is a high performance computing facility designed specifically to process complex data.
Over the past half-decade, MASSIVE has played a key role in driving discoveries in engineering, biomedical sciences and materials research.
Many engineering and scientific discoveries today rely heavily on extremely high performance computing for modelling and experimentation. The data from this research is then sorted and analysed by these computers to convert it into a form that humans can understand.
The M3 supercomputer will provide computing capacity that is malleable, connected, and can be shaped to support the research needs, allowing researchers to analyse and make sense of large volumes of complex data.
For data processing and high-end visualisation, the M3 supercomputer leverages 50 Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU co-processors, with two graphics processing chips per card, and approximately one terabyte per second of memory bandwidth.
The M3 also utilises eight NVIDIA Grid K1 GPUs for medium end visualisation for up to 32 concurrent users; 1,700 Intel Haswell CPU cores; a 1.15 petabyte Lustre parallel file system capable of reading data at a peak of 24 gigabytes a second; and a 100 gigabytes per second Ethernet Mellanox Spectrum network.
“Our collaboration with NVIDIA will take Monash research to new heights. By coupling some of Australia’s best researchers with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing technology we’re going to see some incredible impact. Our scientists will produce code that runs faster, but more significantly, their focus on deep learning algorithms will produce outcomes that are smarter,” said Professor Ian Smith, Vice Provost (Research and Research Infrastructure), Monash University.