“The goal of the capital refresh was to really have a game-changing computational footprint for Western Australia,” Elahi said.
“So we went from about one petaflop (a measure of computing speed representing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second) for the Australian research communities, as provided by Pawsey, to, at the end of the full deployment of Setonix, will be about 50 petaflops.”
The first stage of the upgrade already represents a 45 per cent increase in raw computing power compared to the centre’s Magnus and Galaxy supercomputers.
To put it in perspective, a regular computer has four to eight cores to complete separate tasks with. Setonix phase one has almost 65,000 cores, and when the supercomputer is complete it will boast more than 200,000 cores across 1608 nodes.
Stage two will also incorporate 768 high-end graphics processing units – or GPUs, familiar to fans of computer gaming – to boost the supercomputer’s capabilities.
As Elahi put it; it would take a regular laptop roughly a quarter of a year to complete the equivalent of a minute’s work for Setonix.
Some of the ASKAP radio telescope’s 36 dishes on the traditional lands of the Wajarri Yamatji, at the site of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory.Credit:Alex Cherney/CSIRO
Radio astronomy is going to be one of the big benefactors of the Pawsey centre upgrade – by its very nature it takes a huge amount of computing and memory – but a range of scientific disciplines from molecular dynamics to particle physics also have use for Setonix.
And then there’s research on the computer itself.
“Using supercomputers is not as simple as using a normal computer,” Elahi said.
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“It’s not a matter of just taking a program and running it faster.
“So there’s actually active areas of research just in using the hardware super well.”
And for such a big West Australian project, which will spend a lot of time processing data from another major project further north in the state, it’s only fitting that Setonix draws its name from one of the state’s most recognisable animals – the quokka.
Setonix brachyurus is the scientific name for the fuzzy marsupial found largely on Rottnest Island and made famous internationally through a cute smile and a series of celebrity selfies.