Pawsey Centre
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has won a $48 million project with research agency CSIRO to build a new supercomputer at Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia.
The integrated hardware and software solution features the new Cray EX system that promises to be 30x as fast as two of the centre's existing supercomputers (Magnus and Galaxy).
The new system can reaching 50 petaFLOPs and has more emphasis on accelerators featuring the latest AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPU, and expanded data storage capabilities with the Cray Clusterstor E1000 system.
Phase one of the project will be completed in the third quarter of 2021 and full commissioning completed by the end of 2022.
The project is being touted as the biggest upgrade to Pawsey's computing infrastructure since the centre opened in 2009.
The new supercomputer is part of Pawsey’s Capital Refresh Program, delivered under a $70 million grant from the Australian Government in 2018 to upgrade its supercomputing infrastructure. It is in addition to an $80 million grant in 2009 to establish the petascale supercomputing facility.
“Scientific breakthroughs made by leading research centres, such as Pawsey Supercomputer Centre, inspire us to continue empowering the community with powerful supercomputing solutions that combat the broadest range of challenges,” said Nick Gorga, general manager, HPC and AI, APAC-India at HPE.
Pawsey’s executive director Mark Stickells said the upgrade would provide a “critical move” in strengthening Australia’s research position.
“The new supercomputer will not only deliver next generation compute power to meet these growing requirements, it will enable entirely new research projects with global reach and impact,” he said.
The announcement comes three years after HPE subsidiary, SGI, won a $1.5 million contract CSIRO, to supply, install, and maintain a new Advanced Technology Cluster (ATC) at the Pawsey centre.
The contract, which included software licensing, maintenance and support requirements, installation, and commissioning costs, ended in mid-January 2020.
