GALAXY

Galaxy is a Cray XC30 system supporting radio-astronomy activities within the iVEC community. It fulfils the real-time processing requirements of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope, as well as providing for the reprocessing and research needs of the wider Australian radio-astronomy community, including those of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope. In the context of ASKAP, Galaxy runs the Central Science Processor, allowing pseudo-real-time processing of data delivered, to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, from the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO).

Galaxy consists of three cabinets that contain 134 compute blades, each of which has four nodes. The majority of nodes (484, in 118 blades) support two 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2690V2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ processors operating at 3.00 GHz with 64GB of memory, for a total of 9,440 cores delivering around 200 TFLOPS of compute power. There are also 64 nodes that each support an NVIDIA K20X ‘Kepler’ GPU, alongside an Intel Xeon E5-2690 ‘Sandy Bridge’ host processor at 2.6 GHz, with 32GB of (host) memory.

Communication between the nodes occurs via Cray’s high-speed, low-latency Aries interconnect. Galaxy local storage is provided by a Cray Sonnexion 1600 appliance, providing 1.3 Petabyte of capacity, via an FDR Infiniband network.

Vital statistics

Manufacturer: Cray Inc. (USA)

Model: XC30 Series Supercomputer

Compute Processors: Intel Xeon E5-2690v2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ (10-core, 3.00 GHz), Intel Xeon E5-2690 (8-core, 2.6 GHz)
Computing Power: 200 TeraFLOPS
GPU Processors: Nvidia K20X ‘Kepler’, 64 nodes with Intel Xeon E5-2690 host processors
Memory: 31.55 Terabytes (64 Gigabytes of DDR3-1866 per compute node, 32 Gigabytes of DDR3-1866 per GPU node)
Interconnect: Cray Aries interconnect
Network Topology: Cray Dragonfly
Weight: 1.7 tonnes/ cabinet
Power consumption: Circa. 50 kW/ cabinet
Local storage: Sonnexion 1600 Data Storage System – 1.3 Petabytes Lustre

Interesting facts

• The local storage system in Galaxy contains the same amount of memory as 6400 DVDs.
• Galaxy is dedicated to radio-astronomy research, including processing data from SKA pathfinder projects.
• The cabinet artwork on Galaxy, ‘Rainbow Serpent and Moon’ by Jesse Pickett, is an homage to the Centre’s close connection to the north-west of Western Australia. It has been designed to reflect ‘the sky above’, in reference to radio-astronomy, one of the areas of science iVEC supports most closely. For more information on the artwork, please click here.