'Galaxy' goes live at the iVEC Pawsey Centre

The ASKAP Central Processor – also known as 'Galaxy', the RTC (real time computer) housed within the iVEC Pawsey Centre – has officially gone 'live', allowing the ASKAP team access to the supercomputer to support commissioning activities.

With dedicated data processing software, known as ASKAPsoft, now installed at the Centre, the ASKAP commissioning team has been granted access to begin calibration and imaging of data being collected with ASKAP at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia.

According to Ben Humphreys, ASKAP Science Data Processing Projects Leader, this achievement has depended on close collaboration with colleagues at iVEC and Cray.

"Many thanks must go to our colleagues at iVEC and Cray for the hard work they have done over the past few months to get the final pieces in place to make this happen," he said.

Significant activities coming up for ASKAP at the iVEC Pawsey Centre include:

• Streaming data directly from the MRO to the system
• Migration to the iVEC Pawsey Centre tape archive
• Setting up data services to support the ASKAP processing pipelines
• Further software development towards full ASKAP and automated data processing

The iVEC Pawsey supercomputing system is comprised of a number of integrated solutions including real-time compute and storage (provided by Cray), tape storage (HDS), a hierarchical storage management system and data analysis engines (both SGI).

Supercomputing resources at iVEC's Pawsey Centre will also be available for data-intensive projects across the scientific spectrum, including biotechnology, geosciences and nanotechnology.

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