Supercomputer launches toward Big Data

15 November 2013

Today marks the official operational launch of the iVEC Pawsey Centre – Australia's newest supercomputer facility in Perth, Western Australia. A significant portion of the supercomputing power will be dedicated to processing radio-astronomy data from major facilities, including CSIRO's ASKAP telescope.

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).

Two Cray XC30 supercomputers have already been installed, as well as a general-purpose research system nicknamed 'Magnus', as well as a system to support the real-time processing needs of ASKAP.

The Magnus system has a processing capability of 69 teraflops (one trillion floating-point operations per second), which is to be expanded to approximately 1,000 teraflops in 2014. The ASKAP Central Processor has a capability of 200 teraflops.

In addition to satisfying the real-time processing needs of ASKAP, the Pawsey Centre also provides archival storage; the hierarchical storage management (HSM) software coupled with tape storage form the ASKAP Science Data Archive.

The first stage deployment of the archive has sufficient capacity to support two years of observing with ASKAP. In the future, this capacity may be expanded to support the continued growth of the ASKAP archive.