“The objective of the capital refresh was to essentially have a game-changing computational footprint for Western Australia,” Elahi mentioned.
“So we went from about one petabyte for the Australian analysis communities, as offered by Pawsey, to, on the finish of the complete deployment of Setonix, shall be about 50 petabytes.”
The primary stage of the improve already represents a forty five per cent improve in uncooked computing energy in comparison with the centre’s Magnus and Galaxy supercomputers.
To place it in perspective, a daily pc has 4 to eight cores to finish separate duties with. Setonix section one has nearly 65,000 cores, and when the supercomputer is full it should boast greater than 200,000 cores throughout 1608 nodes.
Stage two will even incorporate 768 high-end graphics processing models – or GPUs, acquainted to followers of pc gaming – to spice up the supercomputer’s capabilities.
As Elahi put it; it might take a daily laptop computer roughly 1 / 4 of a 12 months to finish the equal of a minute’s work for Setonix.
A few of the ASKAP radio telescope’s 36 dishes on the normal lands of the Wajarri Yamatji, on the website of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.Credit score:Alex Cherney/CSIRO
Radio astronomy goes to be one of many large benefactors of the Pawsey centre improve – by its very nature it takes an enormous quantity of computing and reminiscence – however a variety of scientific disciplines from molecular dynamics to particle physics even have use for Setonix.
After which there’s analysis on the pc itself.
“Utilizing supercomputers will not be so simple as utilizing a standard pc,” Elahi mentioned.
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“It’s not a matter of simply taking a program and working it quicker.
“So there’s really lively areas of analysis simply in utilizing the {hardware} tremendous effectively.”
And for such an enormous West Australian mission, which can spend lots of time processing information from one other main mission additional north within the state, it’s solely becoming that Setonix attracts its title from one of many state’s most recognisable animals – the quokka.
Setonix brachyurus is the scientific title for the fuzzy marsupial discovered largely on Rottnest Island and made well-known internationally via a cute smile and a sequence of movie star selfies.
