| 21st of October 2020 |
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| Pawsey supercomputer centre upgrade |
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The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
has
announced that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been selected
to deliver its new supercomputer, which will power future high-impact
Australian research projects by delivering 30 times more compute power
than predecessor systems Magnus and Galaxy.
The new supercomputer will be at least 10 times more energy efficient
than its predecessors Magnus and Galaxy. For the 30-fold increase in
computing power, Pawsey expects the new system’s energy requirements
will only increase by 50 per cent once the system is fully
commissioned. HPE was selected as the preferred vendor under a $48
million agreement following a thorough tender process led by
Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, the centre agent for
Pawsey, based on energy efficiency, cost, and HPE’s integrated
hardware and software solution.
Dr Chenoa Tremblay, a Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO, is using Pawsey’s existing supercomputing systems to analyse extremely sensitive radio telescope signals that could give us our first potential evidence of life outside our solar system. Her team’s work requires scanning more than ten million stars and analysing hundreds of terabytes of data, a herculean task that will be accelerated with the new supercomputer. "Doing this on my laptop would take 25 years," Dr Tremblay said. "Pawsey’s supercomputing systems have brought some of our research timelines from years down to days, giving us the power we need to analyse hundreds of thousands of images quickly. With the signals being very weak, finding new ones will require even more data to crunch." (Image credit: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre) |