The Western Australian Government is providing $15.8 million over four years to iVEC’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, headquartered at Technology Park, Bentley.

 

The funding was announced by the Science and Innovation Minister John Day at the official launch of the iVEC@Murdoch Supercomputer - the first stage in the Pawsey Centre Project.

 

Mr Day said that iVEC@Murdoch, the first of three supercomputers forming the Pawsey Centre Project which is managed by iVEC, will contribute to the Australian Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Pathfinder project and further strengthen Australia’s bid to host the SKA. The iVEC@Murdoch Supercomputer is ranked number 87 in the world and the second largest supercomputer currently in Australia.

 

When complete, the combined supercomputing resources of the Pawsey Centre are expected to rank in the top 20 global supercomputing facilities and support the needs of the Australian radio astronomy, nanotechnology, biotechnology and informatics research communities.

 

A number of research groups are currently trialling the iVEC@Murdoch Supercomputer’s capabilities before it is made available to the wider Western Australian and Australian scientific communities.

 

The cluster is an 87.20 TeraFLOPS system comprising of 9600 processors and 500 terabytes of storage. The Supercomputer is connected to iVEC's Metropolitan Area Network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.

 

iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia and is supported by the Western Australian Government. 

 

For more information on iVEC: http://www.ivec.org/about-ivec