QCIF Opens Fast Lane to Pawsey's Supercomputing Powerhouse

From July 1st, researchers from QCIF member universities will be able to access Setonix, a state-of-the-art HPE Cray EX supercomputer housed at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Western Australia. 

This will allow researchers to build a track record of use on Australia’s Tier 1 High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities outside of the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS). 

Currently QCIF’s member researchers can access the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Facility’s Tier 1 Gadi supercomputer at the Australian National University and the Tier 2 Bunya supercomputer at The University of Queensland. 

Setonix is built on the same architecture used in world-leading exascale supercomputer projects including Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lumi at CSC Finland, and is the most powerful research computer in the Southern Hemisphere and the world’s fourth greenest supercomputer as ranked in the TOP500 and Green500 lists.

Setonix is a hybrid system of central processing units (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU) that are engineered to solve massively complex scientific problems.

“The team at Pawsey have been fantastic to work with to enable QCIF’s special access to Setonix” said Stephen Bird, QCIF’s Executive Manager, Advanced Computing.

“Being able to provide access to Tier 1 facilities to assist early career researchers in building their track record of use has been a fundamental tenet of QCIF’s infrastructure operations, and adding Setonix to this capability rounds out the HPC capabilities we can make available to all our Members.”

QCIF’s eResearch Analyst, and HPC specialist, Dr Marlies Hankel will be coordinating access to Setonix, with QCIF now taking expressions of interest from QCIF’s Member researchers’ for candidate projects. 

Requests and expressions of interest can be sent to support@qcif.edu.au.