Cephalocon 2024

Pawsey receives infrequent blocks of government funding to provide supercomputing, cloud and data services typically at no cost to scientific researchers in Australia. This has a big impact on both the way requirements are determined and on the design and procurement model. Our new 20PB cluster pushes the bounds of what is recommended, for performance and for node density, but we are confident it will serve researchers' needs over the lifespan of the equipment and beyond. This talk will look at the details of this design, and how we determined them, tested them, and increased our confidence of success. Many of these factors are useful in deploying any new cluster, so you will take away some tips on how to get started, or use the experience you already have to build the next one.