Western Australia is officially home to one the world's greenest and most powerful supercomputers, with the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre's Setonix today named in the globally recognised Green500 and Top500 lists.
Setonix, the scientific name for quokka, was recognised as the fourth greenest supercomputer in the world.
It also named as the most powerful public research supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, ranking 15 in the global Top500.
The rankings were announced at the international supercomputing conference SC22 in Texas.
At peak performance, Pawsey's newest supercomputer will provide massively parallel computing power, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of standard computers working in unison for research, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It will only take one second to do a calculation that would take a human 1.5 billion years to achieve.
The McGowan Government has committed $22.4 million over five years to support the operations of the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
Pawsey is a National Research Infrastructure facility and key asset to WA, attracting talent and investment and building the State's reputation as a leader in world class research.
Research areas for the facility include climate change, health and medical, mining, resource minerals processing, agriculture systems and products, geosciences, renewable energy, engineering and radio astronomy.
Users include teams from universities and research institutes, government agencies and authorities, small-to-medium enterprises, and ASX listed companies, with 43 per cent of research projects at Pawsey being from WA over the five year period from June 2016 to June 2021.
Pawsey is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. It is supported by the WA and Australian Governments.
For more information, visit: https://pawsey.org.au/australias-setonix-ranking/
As stated by Science Minister Roger Cook:
"The latest global rankings confirm what the McGowan Government has known for a long time - the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is a key asset not only to WA but the global research community.
"We have one of the world's most powerful and greenest supercomputers right here in Perth.
"Supercomputing makes it possible to develop solutions that would otherwise be unsolvable, and to have Setonix right here in WA benefits not only our research institutes, but our whole economy.
"By continuing our investment in Pawsey, the WA Government is helping to position the State as a national and international leader in high performance computing, and supporting capability building in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."
