Perth, WA – June 2025
Originally established as iVEC — the Interactive Virtual Environments Centre — the initiative brought together founding partners CSIRO, The University of Western Australia, Curtin University, and Central TAFE, with seed funding of $1 million from the Western Australian Government, matched by Commonwealth investment.
iVEC established its first supercomputer, Carlin, in 2002. Housed at the CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in Kensington, this 33-gigaflop system began supporting cutting-edge research across fields such as quantum chemistry, seismic modelling, and molecular biology.
By the end of 2002, 10 projects had already used the system, including research into radio pulsar detection, quantum dot dynamics, coastal ocean circulation, and atomic collision theory, laying the foundation for what would become a national supercomputing service accelerating discovery across all scientific domains.
Fast-forward 25 years, and Pawsey is now home to Setonix, Australia’s greenest and most powerful research supercomputer, delivering 50 petaflops of performance — over 130 million times more powerful than the original Carlin, a Compaq SC40, 20 Alpha CPUs.
From a handful of pioneering users, Pawsey now supports over 200 active research projects annually, spanning health, climate, energy, agriculture, and quantum science.
The centre is also a leading AI-enabled research facility, boasting one of the largest Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) collections in the country dedicated to science. This GPU capability is empowering breakthroughs in machine learning, image processing, and simulation, and positioning Pawsey as a hub for AI innovation.
Pawsey CEO, Mark Stickells, said the anniversary is a moment to reflect not just on technological growth but on the research impact and the people who make it possible.
“From a $2 million start to a $70 million national platform, from 20 processors to more than 200,000 cores — we have built something extraordinary. But our greatest impact is not in petaflops; it’s in the discoveries we have enabled, the research that would not have happened without us, and the next generation of scientists we have inspired. Because at the heart of it all, it is the people who power Pawsey.”
Today, as part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), Pawsey continues to provide equitable access to advanced computing for researchers at any Australian university, playing a vital role in national innovation and capability building.
Over the past quarter century, Pawsey has delivered nearly 5 septillion calculations to researchers, supporting everything from Nobel Prize-winning gravitational wave discoveries to COVID-19 responses, multinational radio astronomy projects, and the integration of quantum computing into real-world research.
To mark the milestone, the Centre hosted an internal event last week with current and former staff, kicking off a series of initiatives that will continue throughout the year. A short video and recap of the day are now available on Pawsey’s LinkedIn account.
As Australia looks ahead to a future defined by data-driven science, Pawsey remains committed to supporting the next generation of researchers and scientific breakthroughs.
