26 September 2005
APAC Board re-affirms the National Role for APAC

23 September 2005
SGI Supercomputer at the APAC National Facility in Full Production

22 September 2005
Dr John Zillman to Chair the APAC Board

September 2005
SGI Supercomputer at the APAC National Facility Powers Australian Science

23 June 2005
IVEC to Purchase an SGI Altix Supercomputer

20 October 2004
New Director for IVEC

IVEC has announced that Dr Andrew Rohl has accepted the position of IVEC Director.

20 August 2004
APPOINTMENT OF MANAGER OF THE APAC GRID PROGRAM

APAC has announced that Dr Rhys Francis has accepted the position of APAC Grid Program Manager.

17 August 2004
IVEC GETS $3.1M BOOST

Western Australia's Interactive Virtual Environment Centre (IVEC) for high performance computing and visualization technology, received an additional $3.1 million in state government funding last week which will go towards bringing its supercomputing facilities in line with the other APAC members.

29 June 2004
Reappointment of Professor John O'Callaghan

The APAC Board has announced the re-appointment of Professor John O'Callaghan as Executive Director until December 2006.

30 May 2004
SAPAC Hydra Supercomputer Launch

Hydra is a new general purpose supercomputer that has recently been purchased by SAPAC in a partnership arrangement with IBM. Hydra is an IBM eServer 1350 Linux cluster with 129 nodes. Each node has two 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon (Pentium 4) processors and 2 GBytes of memory. The theoretical peak speed of the cluster exceeds 1200 GFlops, or 1.2 Teraflops (1.2 trillion floating point arithmetic operations per second).

A Myrinet communications network from Myricom Corporation connects 128 of the nodes to provide high speed communications for parallel processing. Over 2 TeraBytes of disk storage is provided at installation.

Hydra ranks among the fastest two or three supercomputers in Australia and in the top 80 computers in the world.

The purchase of Hydra was made possible by a $500,000 Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Facilities grant from the Australian Research Council, with matching funds from the three SA universities and several research groups, and a generous donation from Myricom Corporation.

Hydra provides world class high-performance computing capability to all South Australian researchers. Hydra is Stage 1 of an anticipated two phase constructuion of the new SAPAC high performance computing facility.

30 May 2004
SAPAC purchase new supercomputer

South Australian scientists and researchers will now be able to make their discoveries much more quickly, thanks to the purchase of a new supercomputer, Aquila.

29 April 2004
$29m funding for the next stage of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC)

The Australian Government Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon Dr Brendan Nelson MP, announced the funding of $29m for the next stage of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC).

22 October 2003
Projects funded on Research Information Infrastructure

The Acting Minister for Education, Science and Training, The Hon Mr Peter McGauran, has announced the funding of successful proposals to help improve Australia's information infrastructure.

One of the proposals was led by the ANU (Professor Robin Stanton) and involves APAC.

8 October 2003
ac3 Supercomputer Breaks Teraflop Barrier

The new Dell cluster computer has completed its benchmark testing, and weighs in at a sustained 1095 gigaflops on Linpack tests.

ac3 are thrilled to have passed the teraflop barrier!

2003
TPAC joins National Virtual Oceanographic Server

The National Virtual Oceanographic Server is a distributed data server that serves the oceanographic community with a very broad range of products.

8 August 2003
Supercomputer is far from being a flop

The Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications (ac3) will install a 147-node cluster running at some 1.5 teraflops in its Sydney data centre. The new ac3 system, costing about $750,000, will use dual 3.06GHz Xeon processors for each node.

The supercomputer will also have 300GB of memory, 1.2TB of storage, and run Red Hat Linux with a 2.4 series kernel. The Australian Research Council (ARC) and a consortium of NSW universities including the UTS, Sydney University, and UNSW jointly fund ac3. Professor Ross McPhedran from the Sydney University Physics department is one of the principal instigators behind the project.

The system, to be supplied by Dell, is being funded by an initial $500,000 grant from ARC with further funding to be supplied by the university consortium.

The new Linux cluster will join ac3's impressive family of high-performance computing hardware including an NEC SX-5 vector computer and a 64-processor SGI Origin 2400.

2003
APAC Linux Cluster now 50% bigger !

150 nodes available. Log on to the Linux Cluster (lc) for shorter queues.

The APAC linux cluster (lc.apac.edu.au) has been upgraded from 100 to 150 processors.

APAC users with codes that do not require the special features of the Alphaserver SC are urged to try using the linux cluster if they have not already done so. For many such codes the processors on the linux cluster will run at similar speed to those on the Alphaserver SC. The cluster has two login/server Xeon nodes and 150 compute nodes with 2.66GHz Pentium 4 processors. Single processor Pentium 4 systems were chosen to maximize the throughput of serial and 'embarrassingly parallel' jobs.

29 May 2001
Success for GrangeNet Proposal

The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston today announced funding of $14 million for GrangeNet (Grid and Next Generation Network) under the BITS Advanced Network Program. The core participants in the GrangeNet consortium are APAC, AARNet, the CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology, Cisco and PowerTel.

15 May 2001
APAC National Facility Opening

14 February 2001
APAC / Compaq Alliance

Compaq Computer Australia and the Australian Partnership of Advanced Computing (APAC) announced an alliance to supply a world class supercomputer to the APAC National Facility.

L-R: Professor John O'Callaghan - Executive Director APAC, Ms Jan Rosi - Compaq Federal Region Manager,
Professor David Beanland - Chair APAC Board, Professor Robin Stanton - PVC (Academic) ANU.

Signing the ANU - Compaq Agreement on 14th February 2001
Professor Ian Chubb, Vice-Chancellor ANU
and Ms Jan Rosi, Compaq Federal Region Manager

7 June 2000
Official Signing of National Advanced Computing Partnership

A national partnership that is investing over $80m in advanced computing systems, research, education and technology diffusion will be officially formed on Thursday 8 June.

The partnership includes 8 organisations that will become partners of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC).

The Executive Director of APAC, Professor John O'Callaghan, said that most Australian universities are involved in the partnership. He said ‘APAC is a truly national partnership with representation from a consortium in every State as well as ANU and CSIRO’.

The official signing of the APAC agreement by these organisations will take place at the ANU Chancelry at 12:45pm on Thursday 8 June, 2000.

APAC will establish a National Facility at The Australian National University in July with substantially more computing capacity than is currently available in the Australian Higher Education sector. Negotiations are currently being finalised to install a supercomputer for the Facility.

The supercomputer will provide scientists and professionals in industry, governments and universities across the country with a boost in computing power and research.

Around two-thirds of the APAC funds will be directed to research, education, and training. The partners will cooperate nationally in such research areas as environmental modelling, data mining, virtual environments, computational chemistry and bioinformatics.

"Through the partnership, users will get much easier access to a range of systems and user support from their desktop — in an analogy with the current power supply, they’ll have access to a ‘computational grid’," Professor O'Callaghan said.