ASKAP is located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamaji as the Traditional Owners and native title holders of the observatory site.

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Dreaming Bigger

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The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is supported by the Australian Government through a $70 million grant made under the Industry Research and Development Act and administered by the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. Pawsey is also supported by the Australian Government under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) through the Department of Education. The Centre would also like to acknowledge the support provided by the Western Australian Government and its Partner organisations.

We are grateful for the support of our core partners.

As one of the most energy efficient systems in the world and ranked in the top 15 for compute power on its debut in November 2022, it represents an enormous advance in Australia’s research supercomputing capability.

It takes its name from Western Australia’s favourite animal, the Quokka (Setonix brachyurus).

Project Manager

Pawsey’s systems bring together the high-performance computing infrastructure needed to accelerate science.

Preparing for the future

Managing
a complex refresh

Making
code more efficient

Our PaCER program has continued throughout the year with all projects being supported via mentored sprints. These sprints have resulted in significant improvements in GPU migration and porting to AMD MI250X GPU’s available in Setonix.

Several of our PaCER projects are accessing Setonix-like HPE Cray EX systems around the world, including Frontier in the United States and LUMI in Finland; the first and third most powerful systems in the world, respectively.

We held our highly successful PaCER Conference, P’CON, in October 2022, which bought together the PaCER projects and enabled the teams to exchange information and learn from each other. P’CON will be run again in 2023 with a hackathon component to further advance project code development.

Bedding down the technology with the introduction of Phase Two of Setonix was an important first step — but the critical test came with migrating researchers across from the old systems.

We were fortunate that the migration to Setonix proceeded smoothly, and the ease of the transition is a credit to the preparation work undertaken by the dedicated staff at Pawsey.

Nonetheless, we needed to undertake a complete rewrite of our documentation to support the new technology, and Pawsey deployed six training packages for Phase one and a further two modules for Phase Two to help our researchers get up to speed.

An important feature of Setonix is that researchers can obtain data about the power usage and efficiency of their code.

Previously, such data was difficult to access and interpret; but with Setonix, clearer feedback enables the development of more efficient code and data workflows.

This advance will help us continue to be more sustainable in our use of HPC.

The supernova remnant is a great example of cutting-edge research. It highlights an unsung hero of the capital refresh, our primary object storage system, Acacia.

Acacia gives researchers the ability to access their data quickly, which means their code can run more efficiently and faster on Setonix. Acacia allows researchers to store more data, which in turn reduces the energy demands from the system.

This stunning image of a supernova remnant came from data collected by CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, one of the precursor instruments to the international SKA project, which was stored on Acacia. Researchers then used Setonix to process the data and this spectacular image was brought to life.

ASKAP is located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamaji as the Traditional Owners and native title holders of the observatory site.

Introducing the most powerful supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, with minimum downtime, is no easy task.

After launching Phase One of Setonix in early 2022, it has been hugely rewarding to see Phase Two now in place on the Pawsey floor.

Collaborations between researchers and developers are producing tangible outcomes and new and exciting science is being performed.

“Once the first stage of Setonix was in place and we started moving researchers across, within a week we were seeing science that just couldn't be previously done with our old systems.”

Acacia
is a disk-based system powered by Dell, providing 60PB of high-speed object storage for hosting research data online.

Galaxy
is unique in being the world’s only real-time, supercomputing service for telescopes used in astronomy research. Galaxy is set to be retired in 2023.

Topaz
provides our users with enhanced GPU capabilities, for AI, computational work, machine learning workflows and data analytics.

Garrawarla
is a dedicated system that is available only to Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomers.