The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) says it is considering acquiring a Linux-based cluster to service a multi-million dollar, three-to-five year contract with Holden at the car manufacturer's new Innovation Centre at Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne.
VPAC's chief executive officer, Professor Bill Appelbe, told ZDNet Australia the supercomputing cluster would have the capacity to handle a peak of 150 gigaflops or 150 billion floating point operations per second. Each of the cluster's processors would handle up to four gigaflops.
Appelbe said the tender, which closed last week, had received five responses from suppliers.
VPAC executives said a Linux solution was "probably the more likely option," despite the fact proprietary Unix was presently the platform of choice for large-scale technical computing systems. They said licence fees for use of a proprietary operating system tended to sharply exceed hardware costs within one to two years of an acquisition, while ongoing support costs also likely to stretch the budget.
"Further rationale for open source--Linux--is that you can find answers from the community or the source code without needing vendor support," Appelbe said. "For mission-critical applications, proprietary Unix still has the edge in support and reliability, but Linux is gaining fast".
Most of VPAC's existing supercomputer assets already operate on Linux, indicating the strength of the consortium's preference for open source over proprietary operating systems.
The news comes after VPAC this week signed an AU$1 million deal with IBM Australia for improved access to computing power and bioinformatics tools, which encompassed supply of a "life sciences" solution including a Linux-based supercomputer cluster.
Appelbe said the just-concluded tender also specified the supply of 1 terabyte of shared storage.
Holden Australia announced the partnership with VPAC in December as part of its Holden Innovation initiative, with chairman and managing director Peter Hanenberger saying it would "enhance our computing capacity to enable us to do the most advanced computer modeling in Australia".
The car manufacturer's initiative involves the establishment of a new research and development hub--a single, stand-alone operation developing future vehicles, new products, and manufacturing technology and concept vehicles.
Linked to General Motors' research operations worldwide, the hub is expected to encompass three areas:
- Product Concept Synthesis--which involves examination of customer needs and how these might be translated into viable products;
- Product Concept Execution--where future Holdens and concept cars are created, and
- Innovation in Technology--which encompasses safety and restraint systems, IT and crash avoidance, environmental technology and virtual engineering.
Hanenberger said the initiative--due to begin within the next few weeks--would start with 20 employees and an annual budget of AU$6 million.
VPAC's Appelbe said the partnership with Holden was designed to deliver "thinking outside the box" engineering.
He said the manufacturer had entered the arrangement as "it did not have a lot of expertise in high-performance computing" and was anxious to reduce development time for new products and services.
The new cluster will complement a supercomputing infrastructure comprising a 194-processor IBM Linux cluster, a 128-processor Hewlett-Packard Alphaserver SC, a 12-processor HP Linux cluster and several multiprocessor machines.
