Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, which also ranks as one of the largest in the world will enable scientists to gain new and valuable insights into issues of pressing national importance like climate change, water management and earth science.
Earlier today it received a $50 million grant under the Super Science Initiative.
It is also the centrepiece of the new National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility at the Australian National University.
Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr launched the new facility in Canberra today with the Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh.
According to researchers at the University, the supercomputer can perform the same number of calculations in one hour that seven billion people armed with calculators could perform in 20 years.
It has a capacity comparable to around 30,000 ordinary laptop computers working together as a single system.
The supercomputer is the result of the close collaboration between the NCI and Fujitsu.
The NCI will provide scientists with a number-crunching power of quadrillions of operations per second, and data storage measured in petabytes - which is millions of Gigabytes.
It also features a high capacity data storage and cloud computing systems in a purpose-built, state-of-the-art data centre.
"The amount of information available to researchers is rapidly increasing, and it takes a big computer to crunch big data," Dr Leigh said.
Supported by the NCI partner agencies CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, Intersect Australia and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, the NCI is a space for collaboration and a centre of supercomputing excellence that attracts scientists from around the world and the best and brightest in Australia.
