The Vayu computer cluster, was the predecessor of Raijin, the Current Peak System of the Australian National Computational Infrastructure, located at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. It was based on a Sun Microsystems Sun Constellation System. The Vayu system was taken from Sun's code name for the compute blade within the system. Vayu is a [Hindu] god], the name meaning "wind". The cluster was officially launched on 2009-11-16 by the Government of Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr,[2] after provisional acceptance on 2009-09-18.[3]
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Performance
Vayu was first operated in September 2009 with one eighth of the final computing power, with the full system commissioned in March 2010.
Vayu has the following performance characteristics:
Physical system
The system comprises:
Power consumption of the full 11936 CPU system will be approx 605 kW, but all the power used will be from green energy sources.
Software
System software for the Vayu cluster includes:
Funding
The national government has provided around A$26m to enable the building of the centre and installation of Vayu. Other participating organisations included the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Australian National University, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, cooperating using an integrated computational environment for the earth systems sciences, including investigating aspects of operational weather forecasting through to climate modelling and prediction. The ANU and CSIRO each subscribed about A$3m, thereby getting about a quarter of the machine.
The ANU and CSIRO, with the support of the Australian Government have already made plans for funding Vayu's replacement, in about 2011-2012, with a machine about 12 times more powerful.