Australia unveils its most powerful supercomputer

Melbourne: Australia`s most powerful supercomputer, Raijin, was today unveiled in Canberra.

Raijin, named after the Japanese God of thunder and rain, has costed USD 45.2 million to build and will cost USD 10.85 million a year to run, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported. The super computer, unveiled at Australian National University (ANU), is said to be the 27th most powerful computer in the world, it said. ANU researchers said the computer can perform the same number of calculations in one hour that 7 billion people with calculators could perform in 20 years. Raijin is a part of the new National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility at the campus. ANU scientist Lindsay Botten said the computer itself is bigger than the size of a house. "It has 57,000 processing cores which is something like 15,000 ordinary personal computers [PCs]. It has 160 terabytes of memory which is like 40,000 ordinary PCs. It has 10,000 terabytes of disk which would be like 10,000 ordinary PCs," he said. Botten said it will encourage weather scientists and climate change researchers to stay in Australia instead of taking their careers overseas. "It keeps Australia at the forefront of global innovation and opens up new horizons for science and research". he said. PTI