Cray matter enhances engineering research

A $1 million Cray supercomputer will boost the research capabilities of Monash University's Engineering faculty.

The recently donated Cray SV1, which will be one of Australia's fastest supercomputers, is designed to work on scientific and engineering problems requiring very large single calculations that cannot be done on a normal desktop computer.

Professor Greg Egan, department of electrical and computer systems engineering head, said the machine would be a powerful tool for ongoing industry research related to genomics, telecommunications, mining, defence and the automotive industry.

"Our work includes simulating very large telecommunications networks, including the next generation mobile networks, in order to determine their performance in applications such as video-conferencing and video-on-demand," he said."We are also modelling solar storm activity over the Antarctic and its effect on telecommunications systems." Professor Egan said the department, along with colleagues in mechanical engineering, was also very interested in infrastructure management.

Professor Egan also said the Cray was a tool for code breaking work on the human genome project in the area of gene sequencing and matching.

Item provided courtesy of Monash University.