Current and future directions for HPC at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
presentation
posted on 2019-05-15, 00:25 authored by Ugo Varetto, Mark GrayPawsey Supercomputing Centre is one of two national high performance computing centres in Australia
providing ‘tier 1’ HPC services to researchers. Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is operated by a joint venture
made of up of partner universities and CSIRO with operational and capital investment from the WA State
government and the Australian Federal Government. Pawsey is currently in the early stages of the design
and procurement of a new generation of computational infrastructure with a new $70m investment, made
available in mid 2018. Rapid and emerging change in the demands made on the infrastructure by an
increasingly diverse research community requires specific technical solutions to be developed during this
process. We will discuss this rapid change, where Pawsey is now and how we are addressing evolving
requirements with our current infrastructure. We will also discuss where HPC is challenged in the coming
period and how we are expecting to meet these challenges.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Ugo Varetto, Chief Technical Officer, is an accomplished manager, bringing international experience, including computational
science, research, supporting complex, distributed software solutions, software engineering and
development, architecture and testing to Pawsey.
His focus is particularly on data-intensive high-performance computing, interactive-distributed
visualisation solutions, with ‘real world’ experience of leading distributed teams across several
continents. He has held key roles in significant projects, such as the EU funded ‘Human Brain
Project’ and also contributed to numerous research projects with the European supercomputing
infrastructure.
His current work includes developing scalable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning
solutions on HPC systems and integrating interactive, in situ visualisation with data mining.
Mark Gray is the Cloud Lead at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre where he manages Nimbus, a
national cloud service for researchers in Australia. Mark has experience in DevOps roles at
Pawsey, IMOS, AusCover and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Mark represents Pawsey Supercomputing Centre both nationally and internationally, with respect to
the use of Nimbus. He also provides project management skills for projects of key strategic
importance to the Centre.
Mr Gray brings a strong research and data management background to his role of managing all
aspects of this service. This includes procurement, deployment, training, user expectation
management – and leadership of the team who administer and operate the service.
