iVEC’s new Performance Optimised Data Centre (POD) may look like just another shipping container but inside is a server cluster that launches iVEC into the top 100 supercomputing centres on the planet.

The supercomputer system is part of the Commonwealth government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative and will result in a massive increase in iVEC’s supercomputing capability, providing a major boost to the resources available to several areas, including a big chunk to radioastronomy.

The POD design incorporates a modified shipping container architecture to create a ‘plug and play’ containerised server cluster that will allow the first phase of the Pawsey Centre project to be online by November 2010, only four months after the acquisition deal was finalised.

This purchase is the first step in creating a world-leading supercomputing architecture to enhance Australia and New Zealand’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The supercomputer, part of the $80M Pawsey Centre project, will be located at Murdoch University’s Centre for Comparative Genomics and will complement the $1 million iVEC infrastructure already housed at the Centre.

An energy-efficient 107 Teraflop system (1 Teraflop = One trillion floating point operations per second), the cluster uses HP ProLiant Blade servers with 9,600 cores and 500 terabytes of high performance storage. It will be part of iVEC's data network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.

Click here to visit iVEC's website.

 

 

Throughout National Science Week astronomers and science communicators from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) will be hitting the road to help the public of Western Australia ‘Tune In’ to radio astronomy.

Discover how a telescope the size of a continent will see back to the beginnings of time and help answer some of the fundamental questions for today's scientists, why WA is one of the few places in the world suited to this relatively new and ground breaking science, and how this telescope of tomorrow will actually see the very first stars and galaxies to form in the Universe billions of years ago.

Australia and New Zealand have been short-listed as one of two locations in the world to host the $2.5B Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, an international mega-science project to develop a ground based astronomical instrument 50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than today’s best radio telescope arrays.

Please click here for dates and information.

In June the Federal Government announced CSIRO will receive $47.3 million for the development of solar and geothermal energy technologies to power a radio-astronomy observatory and its supporting computer centre.

The Sustainable Energy for SKA facility will be funded through the Sustainability Round of the Government’s Education Investment Fund (EIF).

The funding will support renewable energy infrastructure projects for the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and the Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science in Perth.

CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Megan Clark said the new project will accelerate the development of renewable energy technologies in Australia.

"The Sustainable Energy for SKA project will fund solar and photovoltaic technology to help power the Murchison site and the nation's largest direct heat geothermal demonstrator to cool the Pawsey Centre supercomputer," Dr Clark said.

"This project will also allow the practical application of research by scientists and students from all over Australia in renewable energy as well as in astronomy, computer science, engineering, geology and environmental management.

"It is a unique opportunity for many different areas of science to come together and work on something that will benefit all Australians, the development and application of renewable energy technologies."

The Pawsey Centre in Perth, co-located with CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre, will become one of Australia’s largest direct heat geothermal demonstration sites.  Researchers plan to address the heating and cooling requirements of not only the SKA data centre but the entire geosciences facility. They will also conduct research on the performance and longevity of geothermal wells.

The Pawsey High Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science will process more data from ASKAP every day than is contained in the world’s largest library.

The Square Kilometre Array is a global $2.5b program to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Two sites have been shortlisted to host the telescope, one in Australia and New Zealand, and one in Southern Africa.

"Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr is in Europe now promoting Australia’s bid, including at the International SKA Forum in the Netherlands," Dr Clark said.

"A decision on the site is expected in 2012, so it is essential that we make as much progress as we can over the next two years – both technologically and diplomatically."

A full scale hybrid solar storage and generation plant, coupled with sophisticated energy management systems, will also be built to service the CSIRO-managed remote Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory about 700km north of Perth.

The Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and the CSIRO Australian SKA Pathfinder at the Observatory are important parts of the infrastructure for Australia and New Zealand’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.

Both of these facilities have high electricity demands so the ability to feed that demand using on-site geothermal and solar renewable energy technologies will provide multiple benefits.

Web-accessible monitoring infrastructure will be part of the project so that students and researchers alike can observe the project’s progress.

Partnerships will be essential in delivering these projects, and CSIRO is excited at the opportunity to work with industry partners Horizon Power, Geothermal Power and DirectEnergy, its research partners through the Western Australian Geothermal Centre of Excellence, the Geological Survey of Western Australia and the WA Government.

CSIRO is also a member of the EnergyAustralia consortium which was recently announced as the successful bidder for the Federal Government's $100m Smart Grid Smart City initiative to build Australia’s first commercial scale smart energy grid in Newcastle.

These projects are all part of CSIRO’s contribution to large-scale demonstrations of renewable energy technologies that will benefit Australians.

Click here to view this original press release, courtesy of CSIRO.

 Your Guide to the SKA

The SKA is a truly international radio telescope project; over fifty times more powerful than the world’s largest existing telescope it is currently being developed by 19 countries from around the world.

The telescope is named the “Square Kilometre Array” because it is planned to have a collecting area of one square kilometre.

The fully operational telescope will consist of thousands of individual antennas spread over 100 array stations at various locations across the chosen host country. Worth an estimated AU $1.8 billion dollars it will be able to probe key questions in cosmology and physics, even able to look at the early origins of the universe.

As announced at the end of September 2006, Western Australia and South Africa are the two finalist countries being considered to host the SKA. The final decision for the SKA's location will be made towards the end of the decade and construction is expected to begin 2013.

Australia's proposed core site would accommodate the largest array, comprising several hundred antennas and would have exceptional radio quietness and observing conditions.

Radio quietness is essential for good radio astronomy and the Mid West Radio Quiet Zone (RQZ) is protected by a “Radio communications Assignment and Licensing Instruction", which prevents excess radio noise in the area.

If Australia is chosen the SKA's critical central array, the core site would be in Murchison Shire in the mid-west of Western Australia with other array stations spread around WA, Australia and possibly New Zealand. Each array station would be composed of a number of closely grouped antennas and the overall pattern of the SKA could be a huge asymmetric spiral.

The SKA will help to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

Scientists will be able to probe previously unexplored parts of the universe and focus on five key projects:

Cradle of Life – this project will explore whether there are Earth-like planets around other stars, and whether they host intelligent life, thus helping to answer the eternal question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe;

Probing the Dark Ages – this will explore the first black holes and stars, and help to answer the question of what happened after the big bang and before the first stars and galaxies formed;

The origin and evolution of Cosmic Magnetism – this will explore how magnetism affects the formation of stars and galaxies, and what maintains the present-day magnetic fields of galaxies, stars and planets;

Strong field tests of gravity using pulsars and black holes - this will help to test whether Einstein's theory of general relativity is the last word on gravity, for example, whether its predictions for black holes are correct, and whether the cosmos is filled with a gravitational wave background;

Galaxy evolution, cosmology, and dark matter - this will explore how galaxies are born and how they evolve, and seek a better understanding of "dark energy" that fills the majority of the universe.

Already in production is the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP).

This is a smaller version of the SKA being built on the SKA site in Western Australia, it will be a forerunner to the SKA and will help in deciding which nation will be selected for the SKA.

The principal collaborators in the Australian SKA project are the Australian Government, the State of Western Australia and Australia’s premier science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).