The CSIRO, together with Dell Technologies, collaborates on building Virga, the next-generation energy-efficient computing cluster. It will enable scientific research and contribute to industry and economy growth in Australia.
CSIRO has commissioned a newly built high-performance computing system called Virga, developed with Dell Technologies. The Virga uses the latest Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers to make the workflow of the AI as efficient as possible, direct liquid cooling to achieve the best energy efficiency possible. This facility is installed in the Hume Data Centre in Canberra and is the first deployment of its kind in Australia.
Virga would therefore have a very significant role in driving AI-enabled research at CSIRO in everything from solar energy, fire prediction, crop monitoring to vaccine development. "AI underpins nearly all the research we do at CSIRO," says Professor Elanor Huntington, Executive Director of Digital, National Facilities, and Collections at CSIRO. High-performance computing by Virga would also advance robotics and sensing capability, further reinforcing the National Robotics Strategy.
Virga will be important for medical research. The advanced capability of the cluster will underpin the development of new AI models for medical image analysis, including better diagnosis of pathology from MRI scans of children with cystic fibrosis," said Dr. Jason Dowling of CSIRO's Australian e-Health Research Centre.
Powered with powerful NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, 94GB of high-bandwidth memory per GPU, and Intel Xeon processors, Virga enables deep learning, machine learning, and AI workloads at unprecedented speeds. With its hybrid liquid cooling system, energy consumption can be as much as 30% lower compared to traditional air-cooled systems.
Angela Fox, Senior Vice President at Dell Technologies, further elaborates that the advanced AI of Virga will speed up data processing, enabling researchers to fine-tune their models, thus unlocking breakthroughs across many areas of scientific study.