Pawsey Centre to get petascale Cray machine

The Federal Government is to spend $33 million on a Cray supercomputer for Perth's Pawsey Centre for general research and astronomy data processing.

The Cray Cascade system will initially be capable of 0.3 petaflops in 2013, expanding to "more than 1.2 petaflops" when a second phase of the machine is rolled out the following year.

It will use a mix of Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell and MIC processors, though "the precise configuration is still yet to be determined", according to a statement.

Supercomputing group iVEC and the CSIRO will oversee the installation of the Cray supercomputer.

The machine is accompanied by technology from SGI, Oracle, Cisco (switches and routers), and Palo Alto (firewalls).

One partition of the Cray supercomputer is to service Australia's role in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescopes.

The new supercomputer is the last of three components that make up the Federal Government's $80 million Pawsey project.

The other components are a $5 million Linux cluster at Murdoch University (called 'Epic') and a $4 million hybrid-GPU cluster at the University of Western Australia (called 'Fornax').