Swinburne Supercomputing OzSTAR Facility
Our supercomputing OzSTAR facility here at Swinburne has proven to be an excellent research tool in areas of astronomy ranging from simulations of structure formation in the universe to the processing of data collected from telescopes.
Our supercomputing environment is a national high-performance computing (HPC) facility providing computational infrastructure to researchers at Swinburne and astronomers throughout Australia.
The genesis of supercomputing at Swinburne began with the establishment of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in 1998 and gathered pace with the installation of the Green and Green II supercomputers that operated consecutively from 2007 to 2019.
Installed in 2018, the successor OzSTAR is designed to underpin the computational efforts of the Swinburne-hosted Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). It also continues our tradition of operating as a national facility for the astronomy community through the GPU Supercomputer for Theoretical Astrophysics Research (gSTAR) program which receives funding from Astronomy Australia Limited for hardware and software support. Many of the Green II compute nodes live on within the OzSTAR environment.
OzSTAR is one of the fastest supercomputers in Australia and in the top 500 supercomputers worldwide. It is a Petaflops facility which means it’s capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations per second by building upon our expertise for utilising the power of graphics processing unit (GPU) technology for scientific benefit.
OzSTAR comprises over 5,000 processing cores, 230 GPUs, a collective 25 Terabytes of system memory and access to over 6 Petabytes of storage.
Importantly, the supercomputer provides the Swinburne research community with a world-class HPC facility to enhance research endeavours. Usage has grown from its astronomy-focussed origins to now reach into areas such as molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, atom optics and oceanography.
Swinburne Supercomputer
In this video Professor Matthew Bailes discusses the capabilities of Swinburne University's 'Green Machine', its newest Supercomputer. Through the power of the Green Machine, Swinburne Astronomers have made exciting discoveries, like the diamond planet.
The supercomputer's dedicated optical fibre link with the Parkes telescope has led to the most widely publicised research outcome to date: the exciting discovery of the 'diamond planet'.
Supercomputer usage contributes to approximately 80 astronomy publications per year in peer-review journals and a similar number across other Swinburne research disciplines.
The supercomputing program is managed through the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) and is maintained by Swinburne Information Technology (IT).
Accounts on the system are open to all astronomers at publicly funded institutions in Australia and all Swinburne staff and students. On average, time on the facility is split roughly as 60% for astronomy use and 40% for other disciplines at Swinburne
Currently, there are over 400 account holders spread across more than 50 national and international institutions.
Research students regularly represent around half of the facility’s usage.
A portion of the astronomy time is allocated through a merit-based proposal scheme judged by the Astronomy Supercomputer Time Allocation Committee (ASTAC), which is a committee of AAL. Calls for proposals are published on the AAL website and through the Astronomical Society of Australia. The remaining astronomy time is available through a general access job queue.
Related courses
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Astronomy
Swinburne postgraduate Astronomy courses include Master, Diploma and Certificate level qualifications. Access the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.
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Contact the Supercomputing team
Whether you’re a PhD student, media, or an organisation looking to access our facility or partner with us, please contact Professor Jarrod Hurley, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing on +61 3 9214 5787, email jhurley@astro.swinburne.edu.au or visit the OzSTAR website.