HPE is to supply the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) with a Disaster Recovery High-Performance Computing System.
The contract – first spotted by ITnews – runs for three years from July 2022 to July 2025 and is valued at AU$49.3 million (US$35m).
BoM first commissioned Cray to replace an Oracle/Sun-based system in 2015. The Cray XC40, known as Australis, launched with 1.6 petaflops of performance. The Bureau then received Australis II, a four petaflops Cray XC50 and CS500 system, in 2020. HPE last year signed a contract to support Australis until the end of June 2025.
A spokesperson told ITnews that the “Bureau is expanding its HPC capability," and that the new DR HPC will “provide greater resilience to its digital and data services.” It will also “allow for increased data sharing with other government agencies, additional research capacity, and support... operations during peak periods of high-impact weather events.”
BoM declined to share specification details of the system due to ‘commercial-in-confidence arrangements.'
The BoM’s former data center, the central computing facility (CCF), was fully decommissioned in 2020. The CCF, relocated to the bureau’s current Melbourne office in 2004, was a 1520 sqm purpose-designed ‘computer room’ first commissioned in 1974. The Bureau agreed to a two-year, $35 million data center lease with NextDC in 2019.
