Australia's CSIRO launches Virga supercomputer

Australia's national science agency CSIRO has launched its Virga high-performance computing (HPC) cluster which comprises of  Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers containing Intel Xeon processors, Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU accelerators with 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per GPU, and a Nvidia Transformer Engine.

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

Dr. Jason Dowling from CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre added: “The new HPC facilities will allow researchers in our Australian e-Health Research Centre to train and validate new computational models, which will help us develop translational software in medical image analysis for image classification, segmentation, reconstruction, registration, synthesis, and automated radiology reporting.”