MASSIVE boost to life sciences

Life science research will receive a speed boost with the opening today of a new supercomputer for visualisation and data analysis at the Australian Synchrotron and Monash University.

The facility, appropriately called MASSIVE, or Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment, will be used primarily for imaging and 3D visualisation drawing on the mountains of data generated by devices such as the synchrotron.

The supercomputer will consist of two nodes, MASSIVE1, based at the Australian Synchrotron, and MASSIVE2, based at Monash.

Each unit will feature over 500 high-performance CPU cores, with over two terabytes of RAM, and 84 top-end M2070 Tesla graphics processing units (GPU) made by nVidia.

As a point of comparison, each of the Tesla GPUs has over 50% more processing power than top-of-the-line consumer GPUs that enable photorealistic 3D gaming, with each GPU capable of running over half a trillion calculations per second. And MASSIVE has 84 GPUs per unit.

Applications include rendering incredibly detailed three-dimensional visualisations of features such as internal organs or other biological structures.

The main advantage of MASSIVE is the sheer processing power and the corresponding speed of analysis it is capable of performing, says Australian Synchrotron’s Head of Science, Associate Professor, Andrew Peele.

“It can process huge amounts of data in close to real-time,” Peele told ALS. “One of the techniques we use is computer aided tomography, like a CAT scan in a hospital, except it looks at things in much higher resolution.

“It can take hours, if not days or weeks, to do the reconstruction and the analysis to get the three dimensional picture of what we’re looking at. With massive you can do it in an hour.”

According to Peele, the benefit of this is more than just faster processing. “It means you can be on an experiment, and you can analyse a set of data, you can find the regions of interest, decide if you want to look at a particular area or not, and then you can go on and do that.

“You can do this within a day or two or beam time. You can do a whole series of linked experiments where you make decisions based on the previous experiment.”

“Without MASSIVE, you’d take your data set away, and three months later you’d come back and you’d look at the next one. MASSIVE compresses the time you can do experiments in tremendously.”

The supercomputers will also allow researchers to load and analyse far larger data sets than were able to be handled previously.

MASSIVE will allow experimental work, including real-time image reconstruction, at the Imaging and Medical, Macromolecular Crystallography, Microspectroscopy, and Small & Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS/WAXS) beamlines at the Australian Synchrotron.

MASSIVE will be made available to researchers through the National Compute Infrastructure (NCI) programme, a national body that was set up to support Australian researchers by creating high-end computing services.

It is funded by the Australian Synchrotron, Monash University and by both the State Government of Victoria and the NCI.

It is set to go live in April of this year.