29th of March 2021 |
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Pawsey's new supercomputer |
The world’s friendliest animal will lend its name to Australia’s
fastest new research supercomputer, with
the Pawsey Centre confirming its new system will be named Setonix – the scientific name for the
quokka.
The HPE Cray EX supercomputer will be 30 times more powerful than
Pawsey’s existing systems, Magnus and Galaxy, and will be used to help
accelerate research projects such as the Square Kilometre Array.
Pawsey Centre Executive Director Mark Stickells says,
"Pawsey has long had an affinity with the quokka — one of our existing
systems was used by UWA Associate Professor Parwinder Kaur to map the
quokka genome as part of an international conservation effort."
The existing supercomputers at the Pawsey Centre, Magnus and Galaxy together have 1.83 petaFLOPS of raw compute power. Setonix will deliver 50 petaFLOPS of power. Setonix will be delivered in two stages, with the first stage, due later this year, immediately increasing the computing power of the centre by 45 per cent. Phase two will be available by the middle of next year. This is not the first project to recognise Western Australia's short-tailed scrub wallaby: a project making use of Stokes Q and Stokes U polarisation products at the ATCA has the name QUOCKA -- QU Observations at Cm wavelength with Km baselines using ATCA! |