Swinburne supercomputing: OzSTAR and Ngarrgu Tindebeek

Our supercomputing environment is a national high-performance computing (HPC) facility providing computational infrastructure to researchers at Swinburne and astronomers throughout Australia.

The genesis of supercomputing at Swinburne began with the establishment of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing in 1998 and gathered pace with the installation of the Green and Green II supercomputers that operated consecutively from 2007 to 2019. In 2018, the successor OzSTAR was designed and installed to underpin the computational efforts of the Swinburne-hosted Centre for Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).

In 2022, Swinburne received $5.2m from the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund to upgrade to the Ngarrgu Tindebeek supercomputer, named by Wurundjeri elders through the assistance of the Moondani Toombadool Centre. Translating as “Knowledge of the Void” in the local Woiwurrung language and representing the goal of harnessing the power of a supercomputer to enable researchers to explain the unknown and push the boundaries of knowledge. Ngarrgu Tindebeek runs in parallel alongside OzSTAR as part of an expanded OzSTAR supercomputing environment.

The Ngarrgu Tindebeek supercomputer builds on Swinburne’s long history of supercomputer design, development and operation, which includes discovering many of the first Fast Radio Bursts and determining the parameters of gravitational wave events. It has a processing capacity of millions of times beyond that of regular computers, enabling groundbreaking research into space, the brain and complex ecosystems on Earth.

Its capabilities include forming a better understanding of:

• the mysteries of space including gravitational waves, black holes and galaxy formation
• the brain’s operation through analysis of brain data by neuroscientists and neuroimaging experts
• our planet through earth observation data generated from satellites and other ecosystem analysis.

Importantly, the supercomputing program provides the Swinburne research community with a world-class HPC facility to enhance research endeavours. Usage has grown from its astronomy-focussed origins to now reach into areas such as molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, atom optics and oceanography.