UWA home to $2.4m US supercomputer

Western Australian scientists and engineers are awaiting the arrival of a $2.4 million supercomputer, which will be based at the University of Western Australia.

Expected to arrive in the second half of 2005, the American-made Cray XT3 supercomputer will be the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and will be used to help solve large research and scientific problems.

A joint venture between Central TAFE, CSIRO, Curtin and Murdoch universities and UWA –the WA Interactive Virtual Environments Centre (IVEC) – was awarded a grant from the Australian Research Council to help pay for the supercomputer.

The XT3 will be part of a new facility at UWA called the WA Supercomputing Program (WASP).

Cray will contribute about $1 million worth of support for the project.   Cray’s chief technology officer, Steve Scott, visited Perth last week to discuss the best Cray XT3 system configuration for WA.

Dr Scott said Cray provided innovative computing platforms that enable scientists and engineers in academia, government and industry to meet existing and future computer challenges.

He addressed four seminars in Perth on Cray’s vision for high-performance computing, challenges facing breakthrough research, trends in various marketplaces, and Cray products.

IVEC director Andrew Rohl said it was an exciting time for researchers in academia and industry.

“The whole deal is worth about $3.4 million,” he said “The Cray XT3, which will be 50 times faster that IVEC’s current three-year-old computer, will be capable of making nearly a trillion calculations a second.”

Professor of Computational Chemistry at the Nanochemistry Research Institute based at Curtin University, Julian Gale, said research of chemicals at the atomic level was one project that would benefit from the Cray XT3 supercomputer.

 “The supercomputer will have a lot more processes than we currently have,” he said. “It will be able to do existing calculations but do them a lot faster.”

 Professor Gale said geology, biology and astrophysics were other research fields that would benefit from the supercomputer.