CSIRO unveils its Virga HPC – Hardware

CSIRO has taken the wraps off a new Dell-built high-performance computer (HPC) cluster called Virga.

Virga has been in the works since a November 2022 tender for the project, which was awarded to Dell at the end of July last year.

The system supersedes a previous Dell-powered HPC that CSIRO called Bracewell.

The science agency said that Virga is named “after the meteorological effect of rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground … in recognition of CSIRO’s decades of research into cloud and rain physics.”

The Virga cluster is housed at CDC’s Hume Data Centre in Canberra, and built with Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers containing Intel Xeon processors, NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per GPU, and NVIDIA Transformer Engine to “speed up AI performance and capabilities and helps train large models within days or even hours”, CSIRO said.

“Virga will provide the critical computing infrastructure needed for machine learning and AI to grow Australia’s industry and economy,” CSIRO’s digital, national facilities and collections executive director Professor Elanor Huntington said in a statement.

“AI is used in practically all fields of research at CSIRO, such as developing world-leading flexible printed solar panels, predicting fires, measuring wheat crops and developing vaccines, just to name a few.”

E-health research will also be powered by the new HPC.