SGI have announced that the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) at the University of Tasmania’s (UTAS) supercomputing facility have just installed a chunky 64 node Altix ICE compute cluster.

‘Katabatic’ has a total of 512 processors and a terabyte of RAM, and will be used for Antartic and South Pacific climate modelling.

Thirty full-time TPAC users and more than 100 university researchers in the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC), the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), the School of Chemistry, the School of Maths and Physics, and the Menzies Research Institute share access to Katabatic every day.

The Altix ICE cluster also boasts over 70TB of disk space, and over 500TB of mirrored tape storage. More on SGI‘s press release here.