Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) announced on Monday a deal to build the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) at the University of Tasmania on the eponymous Australian island state. As part of the deal, SGI will build a new x64-Linux cluster codenamed Katabatic for climate research.

"Katabatic supports vital, nationally important research for projects requiring state-of-the-art HPC capabilities, including in ocean, atmosphere, Antarctic ice sheet and climate modeling, computational chemistry, and fluid dynamics," said Dr. Nathan Bindoff, University of Tasmania professor and partnership director, and Nobel Laureate.

The SGI Altix computer cluster offers 64 clustered blade servers with 512 processors, a terabyte of RAM, and up to 2 teraflops of peak compute power, or four times the performance of the legacy system it replaces, SGI said. As for hard drive space, Katabatic offers over 70TB, along with 524TB of mirrored tape storage.

Image Credit: lrz-muenchen.de