WA to be a leading global supercomputing centre

John Day
Minister for Planning; Culture and the Arts; Science and Innovation

Science and Innovation Minister John Day recently launched the State’s newest high-performance computer at The University of Western Australia (UWA) – the second and final pathfinder to iVEC’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Mr. Day said the Pawsey Centre, which is scheduled to be completed in 2013, would make WA host to one of the top echelon of supercomputing facilities in the world.

The Minister said the State Government had committed more than $32million since its establishment in 2000. “WA has established an impressive reputation for the development of high-performance computing infrastructure and expertise, and iVEC@UWA further reinforces this,” he said. “This high-performance computer joins the infrastructure already in use at iVEC’s Technology Park Bentley headquarters and the other Pawsey pathfinder at Murdoch University, adding further capacity to the State’s existing high-performance computing infrastructure.”

He continued: “It will greatly benefit a range of data-intensive research applications, including the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project under way in the Mid-West, nanotechnology, biotechnology and geoinformatics. iVEC@UWA already ranks highly in the top 500 global supercomputing centres. Feedback from several early adopter researchers has been extremely positive and the facility is now open to the wider WA and Australian research communities.”