“The goal of the capital upgrade was to really have a game-changing computational footprint for Western Australia,” Elahi said.
“So we went from about a petabyte for the Australian research communities, as given by Pawsey, to, at the end of the full Setonix deployment, it will be about 50 petabytes.”
The first stage of the upgrade already represents a 45% increase in raw computing power compared to the center’s Magnus and Galaxy supercomputers.
To put this into perspective, a normal computer has four to eight cores to complete separate tasks. The first phase of Setonix has almost 65,000 cores, and when the supercomputer is complete, it will have more than 200,000 cores on 1608 nodes.
The second stage will also incorporate 768 high-end graphics processing units (or GPUs, familiar to PC game fans) to increase the supercomputer’s capabilities.
As Elahi said; A normal laptop would take about a quarter of a year to complete the equivalent of one minute of work for Setonix.
Some of the 36 dishes of the ASKAP radio telescope on the Wajarri Yamatji traditional lands at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory site. Credit: Alex Cherney/CSIRO
Radio astronomy will be one of the big benefactors of the Pawsey Center upgrade (by its very nature it requires a lot of computing and memory), but a range of scientific disciplines, from molecular dynamics to particle physics , also have use for Setonix.
And then there is research on the computer itself.
“Using supercomputers is not as simple as using a regular computer,” Elahi said.
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“It’s not just about taking a program and running it faster.
“So there are areas of active research just in using the hardware really well.”
And for such a large project in Western Australia, which will spend a lot of time processing data from another major project further north in the state, it’s fitting that Setonix takes its name from one of the most recognizable animals in the state: the quokka.
Setonix brachyurus is the scientific name of the fuzzy marsupial found mainly on Rottnest Island, which became internationally famous thanks to a cute smile and a series of celebrity selfies.
An outline of a quokka even adorns the Setonix case in the center of Pawsey.
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