SUPERCOMPUTING UPGRADE AT THE AUSTRALIAN BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has recently made a major upgrade to its supercomputer and its Central Computer Facilities (CCF), located in the Bureau’s new headquarters in Melbourne. This paper describes the overall CCF with particular emphasis on the new NEC SX-6 supercomputing facilities. The porting experiences in migrating from the previously installed SX-5 facilities to the multi-node SX-6 environment supported by NEC IA-64 TX7 file servers and associated global file system are described. The system usage and performance of several major Bureau operational applications on the SX-6 are presented along with a discussion of planned upgrades of these applications.