Australian Pawsey Centre to Install Cray Cascade Super for High-powered Astronomy

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The Australian government has announced plans to install a 1.2 Petaflop Cray Cascade supercomputer at the Pawsey Centre in Perth. The Pawsey Centre supercomputer will be focussed on supporting the data-intensive science to be carried out using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescopes, as well as supporting other research areas including geosciences, nanotechnology and biosciences. The $33m supercomputer will be installed in two phases scheduled for June 2013 and June 2014.

The Pawsey Centre supercomputer will be a Cray Cascade system with partitions for multi-purpose research and real-time processing of radio astronomy data. In 2013 it will have a combined performance of 0.3 petaflops, or 300 trillion 14 digit numerical calculations per second. In 2014 this will be expanded to more than 1.2 petaflops, using a combination of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors, although the precise configuration is still to be determined.

Launched in 2009, the Pawsey Centre (named after Dr Joseph Pawsey, an Australian pioneer in the field of radio astronomy) is located adjoining CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in the Technology Park, Kensington, Western Australia. Read the Full Story.