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Australia's national supercomputer and big data facility, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with its Singaporean equivalent, the National Supercomputing Centre of Singapore (NSCC) to collaborate more closely on technology.
The NCI released a statement this week saying it hoped the MoU will grow the capabilities of both centres and bring about advances in supercomputer software technologies and in the development of staff at both facilities, as they share access to new technologies over the next three years.
The collaboration is expected to be especially useful now considering recent advancements in supercomputing that have led to the development of the world's first exascale supercomputer capable of calculating at least 10 to the power of 18 floating point operations per second (or 1 exaFLOPS).
This milestone was reached by Japan's Fugaku supercomputer that gets its namesake from Japan's Mount Fuji, in June 2020. It achieved the benchmark score of 1.42 exaFLOPS in the HPL-AI benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Fugaku's development is a huge leap forward in computing power that dramatically cuts down the time it takes to make calculations to find solutions to the most pressing problems known to humankind.
For example, if scientists were attempting to calculate the most effective drug from among a sample of 2000 candidates, the Fugaku could find the solution in just 3 days, compared to its predecessor the K computer that would take a whole year.
Credit: Dominic Bayley / IDG Working together on exascale computing developments will be high on the agenda for the two facilities, as will a range of other topics in high performance computing (HPC) - including green data centre technologies, network connectivity, and more secure data transfer using quantum encryption technology.
NCI director professor Sean Smith said, "NCI and NSCC have been close collaborators for many years now, and this memorandum of understanding builds and furthers the relationship that we've built. We are extremely excited to continue to work with our NSCC colleagues to further the interests of supercomputing, big data and high-throughput computing users in the Asia-Pacific region."
