Australian Solid Earth
Simulator (ASES)Australian Solid Earth
Simulator (ASES)
The
Australian Solid Earth Simulator is a thematic national parallel supercomputer
facility supporting development of numerical simulation models for the physics
of the entire earthquake process and other solid-earth phenomena. This program
represents the Australian national program participating in the APEC
Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES). The simulation models being
developed offer the potential to resolve outstanding scientific questions on
earthquake phenomena and advance the scientific underpinning of industrial competitiveness
in domains such as engineering/ construction, mining, and minerals exploration.
The Australian Solid Earth Simulator supports multi-disciplinary groups from
The University of Queensland, University of Western Australia and CSIRO spanning
earth sciences, mathematics, computer science and engineering. The multi-disciplinary
program coupled with the creation of a virtual laboratory software environment
for simulation of solid earth and solid mechanics processes offers an outstanding
opportunity for scientific and technological advancement applicable to a wide
array of environmental and industrial domains.
The Australian Solid Earth Simulator consists of two nodes each equipped with an SGI Origin 3800 parallel supercomputer. The main node, located at QUAKES, will serve the Australian national groups participating in ACES and international visitors to the ACES HQ. In its final configuration scheduled in March 2003, the main node will have a performance of 144 GFlops making it roughly comparable in performance to the most powerful computer in Australia as listed in the June 7, 2000 Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The second node of the Australian Solid Earth Simulator will be located in Western Australia to serve the WA ACES groups and will have a peak performance of 28.8 GFlops in its final configuration (2002).
Stage 1 (2000)
16 GFlops, SGI Origin 3800 system, MIPS processors, IRIX operating system
Main Node:
- Location: QUAKES, The University of Queensland
- Specs: 16 x 400Mhz R12000 MIPS processors, 8 GB memory, 1.3 TB disk, 12.8 GFlops (peak performance)
WA Node:
- Location: Centre for Industrial Solid Mechanics (CISM), CSIRO, Western Australia.
- Specs: 4 x 400Mhz R12000 MIPS processors, 2 GB memory, 430 GB disk, 3.2 GFlops (peak performance)
Stage 2 (2002)
172.8 GFlops, SGI Altix 3000 system, Intel IA64 processors, Linux operating system
Main Node:
- Upgrade to 52 x MIPS R12000 processors and 26 GB memory, 41.6 GFlops (peak performance), since Feb. 2002
- Upgrade to 40 x Intel IA64 processors and 20 GB memory, est. 144 GFlops (peak performance), end of March 2003
WA Node:
The Australian Solid Earth Simulator was funded by