NCI

NCI Australia is the nation's most highly-integrated, high-performance research computing and data science environment. Based at The Australian National University, it brings together the Australian Government, universities, national science agencies and industry. Major Collaborators include ANU, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia. As well as the unique NCRIS $70 million investment to upgrade infrastructure which enabled NCI to build Gadi , NCI currently receives approximately $6 million per annum from NCRIS to support its operating costs. In total, NCI has been allocated more than $210 million through Federal Government funding since 2006. What is a supercomputer? A supercomputer is a cluster of thousands of powerful computers connected to each other with high-speed optical fibre cables. This lets researchers combine dozens, hundreds or thousands of processors together to run single calculations, sharing tasks between the processors and making some kinds of scientific research possible for the first time. Some calculations that would take years to complete on a laptop or desktop takes minutes or hours running on a supercomputer. Some other calculations use and produce so much data, and require such a large amount of simultaneous computation, that they could never be run on a desktop and only ever work on a supercomputer. Gadi is the 24th* most powerful research supercomputer in the world, and the most powerful in the Southern Hemisphere. It has 148,800 processor cores capable of performing more than 9 quadrillion operations per second. This is the same number of calculations that would be done if a full Melbourne Cricket Ground's worth of people all had their smartphones running at the same time. Running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Gadi is the underpinning infrastructure for much of the Australian scientific community.