Pawsey Supercomputing Centre Spins Up ‘Garrawarla’ for Astronomical Insight

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is welcoming a new GPU cluster, Garrawarla, a key resource for the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope project in Australia, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array. Procured by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, from HPE in early 2020 at a cost of 2 million AUD (~$1.5 million USD), Garrawarla is now fully operational and available to astronomy researchers. The upgrade is one part of the 70 million AUD (~$51.5 million) Capital Refresh project funded by the Australian government.

Garrawarla will enable astronomers to process in excess of 30 PB of MWA telescope data using Pawsey infrastructure. “Garrawarla” means spider in the language of the Wajarri people, whose land the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory is on. The 546 teraflops (peak) system offers GPU capabilities to power computational work, machine learning workflows and data analytics, all in support of accelerating astronomy research.

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