Austal Partners with Computing Services Company DUG

Shipbuilder Austal Australia said it has engaged Perth-based high-performance computing as a service (HPCaaS) company DUG Technology group to provide burst compute and storage services to the Henderson, Western Australia shipyard.

HPCaaS (HPC) provider DUG plans to build the world’s first climate-positive HPC data center in Geraldton, Western Australia; powered by renewables and featuring the company’s patented immersion cooling system that reduces power consumption by up to 51%, compared to traditional computer facilities.

Austal Australia’s advanced vessel design processes are demanding and involve intensive calculations and programming to conduct tasks such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. Austal is also increasingly using big data analytics to optimize the performance of vessels, through products such as MARINELINK-Smart, as well as machine-learning techniques to optimize vessel designs.

Austal chief digital officer Andrew Malcolm said, “DUG is an ideal partner for Austal, not only as an Australian-based high-performance computing service provider but one of the greenest in the world.

“Austal will be running computational analysis through DUG to improve the efficiency of our vessel designs and reduce their GHG emissions; a great combination of world-leading Australian expertise and capability, tackling the challenge of decarbonization.”

Austal will be utilizing DUG McCloud, a collaborative cloud solution that enables bursts of computational capacity, on demand, using software.