The University of Western Australia has joined the global supercomputing ranks after the purchase of the new Fornax supercomputer.

 

The purchase will allow UWA scientists to explore new, previously inaccessible, areas of high-powered data research.  

 

The purchase forms part of the Federal Government’s $80 million Super Science initiative to bolster the country’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.

 

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.

 

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.