A new $4 million terascale research supercomputer, funded under the Australian Government's Super Science Initiative, has been launched at The University of Western Australia.

Named Fornax, Latin for 'furnace', after a southern hemisphere constellation known as a birthplace for stars, the computer is the second of three supercomputers commissioned as part of the $80 million Pawsey Centre project, which is a participant in Australia and New Zealand's successful bid to co-host the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope.


The two new supercomputers are forerunners to the more powerful petascale Pawsey Centre supercomputer system being installed in 2013. Fornax and its partner 'Epic' are helping researchers to develop the expertise needed to get the best out of the Pawsey supercomputer when it comes online.

Fornax is operated by iVEC, a collaboration between CSIRO and University of Western Australia (UWA), Murdoch University, Curtin University and Edith Cowan University.

 

The system contains 6.9 terabytes of RAM, 672 terabytes of storage and 1152 CPUs, operating across 96 nodes. At peak performance, the system is capable of performing 62 teraflops, or 62 trillion operations per second.