ACADEMIA

Australia moves a step closer to the top ranks of global supercomputing with The University of Western Australia's purchase of the "Fornax" supercomputer, allowing scientists to explore new vistas of high-powered data-intensive research.

The supercomputer purchase is part of an $80m Australian Government Super Science Initiative to bolster Australia's bid for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) through the creation of the Pawsey Centre, a supercomputing facility supporting radio astronomy and boosting Australian supercomputing resources for data-intensive research in areas such as nanoscience, geoscience and other computational communities.

Professor Robyn Owens, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at UWA said: "The University of Western Australia has a significant stake in the processing of data to support a variety of crucial scientific endeavours including the SKA.

"The addition of the Fornax computer to The University of Western Australia will greatly enhance the supercomputer generating power in Australia."

Based at the iVEC@UWA facility and managed by WA supercomputing leader iVEC, the new supercomputer has been designed to handle data intensive problems characteristic of many areas of current science research.  The system will consist of over 1000 CPU cores, 96 GPUs, half a petabyte of general disk storage and more than another half petabyte of fast storage closer to the CPUs.

The name of the machine reflects one of the major research projects requiring data intensive computing - astrophysics and the challenges of the Square Kilometre Array.  Fornax is Latin for ‘furnace', the name of a well known southern hemisphere constellation where things are made (discovered) from raw materials (data).

Representing the second pathfinder system in the Pawsey Centre project that will see a purpose-built supercomputer facility constructed at CSIRO's Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) in Kensington, Fornax will be located in The University of Western Australia's Physics Building as part of the iVEC@UWA Facility.

iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO and the four public WA universities.  iVEC fosters and promotes scientific and technological innovation through the provision of supercomputing and eResearch services to the research community, commercial organisations and government agencies.  iVEC was charged with establishing and operating the $80 million Pawsey Centre project by the Australian government.

The Pawsey Centre project (named after Dr Joseph Pawsey, an Australian pioneer in the field of radio astronomy) was officially launched by Senator Kim Carr, Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 27 August 2009.  It is expected to be amongst the top 20 supercomputers in the world at the time of its commissioning in 2013.