Research computing consortium eResearch South Australia is looking to follow in the footsteps of the University of Melbourne by implementing what it describes as ‘cloud-based’ high performance compute cluster. It comes a month after the University of Melbourne launched a new cluster called Spartan, which allows power users to access optimised bare-metal HPC capabilities, while offloading less critical workloads to the cloud component of the system. A similar ‘cloud-based’ HPC cluster at eRSA is set to replace Tizard, an aging SGI HPC cluster with Nvidia GPU nodes that was launched in 2012. eRSA chief executive Mary Hobson told iTnews the organisation expects to implement the new system by the beginning of next year, subject to federal grant applications being approved. "We put the bid in in April, and we’ll know in October if we’ve got the funding. If we don’t get the funding we’re planning to lease something that’s similar but not quite as big on an on-demand basis,” Hobson said. The new system will handle “short burst, relatively shorter project work”, while more computationally intensive tasks will be shifted to the University of Adelaide’s HPC cluster, dubbed Phoenix, which launched in February. Learn more at http://www.itnews.com.au/news/ersa-plans-new-cloud-based-hpc-cluster-431204