CSIRO unveils new $15m Dell-built ‘supercomputer’ to help tackle Australia’s flatlining productivity

Australia’s science agency has spent $15m on a new ‘supercomputer’ that it says will speed up scientific discoveries, helping grow the national economy.

CSIRO’s new supercomputer, dubbed Virga, which the agency says will speed up research and scientific discoveries.

Australia’s peak research agency, CSIRO, has spent $15m on a new “supercomputer” that it says will speed up scientific discoveries, helping grow the national economy.

US tech titan Dell built the computer cluster, dubbed Virga – the meteorological effect of rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground. It features Nvidia H100 chips, which cost about $US25,000 each, which the agency says will allow it to complete power-hungry artificial intelligence workloads.

While AI has attracted much hype with the tech giants branding it on almost every new product, CSIRO says its application on the “high performance computer (HPC)” will deliver tangible results.

Jason Dowling from CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre said medical imaging analysis was one application in which AI can deliver a significant benefit, effectively giving doctors a second pair of eyes.

“The new HPC facilities will allow researchers in our Australian e-Health Research Centre to train and validate new computational models, which will help us develop translational software in medical image analysis for image classification, segmentation, reconstruction, registration, synthesis and automated radiology reporting,” Dr Dowling said.

“One collaborative project with the Queensland Children’s Hospital that will benefit from the new cluster is the training of artificial intelligence models to diagnose pathology from MRI scans of the lungs in children with cystic fibrosis.”

Elanor Huntington, CSIRO’s digital, national facilities and collections executive director, said AI was used in “practically all fields of research”, including developing flexible printed solar panels, vaccines, predicting fires and measuring wheat crops.

“High performance computing systems like Virga also play an important role in CSIRO’s robotics and sensing work and are crucial to the recently launched National Robotics Strategy to drive competitiveness, and productivity of Australian industry.”

Labour productivity increased by just 0.1 per cent in the March quarter, with the Reserve Bank warning that growth needed to “pick up in a sustained way if inflation is to continue to decline”.

Many companies are turning to artificial intelligence to help increase output, using tools such as Microsoft Copilot to allow staff to automate more tasks, such as analysing and drafting tenders and other documents, and slashing call centre wait times.

CSIRO said its high performance computer – which has 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per graphics processing unit – will “significantly speed up AI performance”, training large models “within days or even hours”. Other hardware includes 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Chief technology officer Angus Macoustra said the new computer – which will be housed at CDC’s Hume Data Centre in Canberra – is also more environmentally friendly than similar equipment, using direct liquid cooling instead of more energy intensive air cooling.

“Supercomputers are very energy intensive. They generate a lot of heat, and historically, CSIRO has got by with using air-based cooling approaches,” Mr Macoustra said.

“But with these new generations, we knew that would no longer be sufficient, so we did look to bring in a liquid-cooling solution, and we’re confident with Dell’s and CDC’s demonstrable capabilities and experiences in that regard.”

Mr Macoustra said CSIRO had been using systems like Virga since 2009 and the new computer would be accessible to all of CSIRO’s research and engineering teams.

“We have other systems, computational data systems in CSIRO. We have close to 2000 registered users of all of those systems, just to give you an appreciation of how many projects use it.

“So our environmental modelling and simulation teams … use systems like this heavily, also our health, manufacturing, agriculture, space and astronomy.”

Dell Technologies Australia senior vice-president Angela Fox said the Virga AI system can examine large volumes of scientific data and then help researchers improve the models they build.

“Dell Technologies provides organisations with solutions and expertise that accelerate AI and bring value to their data,” Ms Fox said.

“With Dell PowerEdge servers as the foundation, Virga will help create new Australian scientific breakthroughs using its AI capabilities, all the while being both more sustainable and more energy efficient than previous generation clusters.”