For nearly a century, Australia’s leading science and technology research institute, CSIRO, has been improving the lives of people everywhere with science. Through inventions and innovations, CSIRO gives a significant positive impact such as faster WiFi, polymer banknotes, the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet and Aerogard.

Overview

This project was in collaboration with CSIRO’s radio astronomy, deep space tracking, and communication activities departments. The company handles data workloads that relate to space science coordination, advanced aerospace business development, and national/international facilities management. With such a unique and exclusive in-house workload, the company looked at building a solution from the ground up with DiGiCOR and other vendors in conversation. Hence, this allowed us to integrate many reliable and high-quality systems with the company and help gain the trust of our client.

CSIRO was looking to acquire a solution that they had preconfigured from the ground-up, to tackle astronomy workloads such as satellite networks and space imaging within their location. This type of workload required significant computing and processing power as the main driving factors from the organisation’s professors and scientists. In addition to this purely high-performance solution, they required flexibility and scalability within systems to fit different local in-house workloads and projects.

•  Acquire a solution that they had preconfigured from the ground, to tackle the astronomy workloads
• Obtain a system that provides significant computing and processing power
• Flexible and scalable system

We worked closely with the company to optimise their solution so that they could fully integrate into their unique space-related onsite operations. The solution that we worked together on providing an alternative to their initial technology proposal for internal number crunching. We satisfied many driving factors through our ability to locally drive highly scalable and flexible solutions within Australia.

We collaboratively provided a better and more cost-performant solution that took care of their business objectives and budget without any sacrifice.

To meet CSIRO Astronomy’s specific requirements, we proposed an FPGA-focused workstation solution, the DiGiCOR model ST83-DS228-MND10GOR:

Dual socket FPGA-optimised workstation supports 2nd Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and 20 cores for CPU rendering potential power. In addition, this solution can be optimised with up to 4x GPUs such as NVIDIA Tesla, Quadro RTX or GeForce RTX.
Ideal for any intensive workloads such as rendering, machine learning, AI, or any heavy parallel computing.

Considering the specific astronomy workloads, we successfully met the organization's requirements for local availability and provided scalable, flexible solutions.

Initially, the proposed solution included GPUs, but we recommended utilizing FPGAs instead. FPGAs offer immediate high-latency data processing via a unique hardware interface and real-time reactions based on incoming data. Unlike GPUs, FPGAs allow for customizing processing functionality at a logic port level, making them optimal for responsiveness and dedicated special-purpose innovation, particularly for astronomy and space workloads. Consequently, our solution proved highly satisfactory, offering both cost-effectiveness and performance.

Our commitment to delivering high-quality products, services, and support fostered a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with the organization.