The machine, called Fornax, is being housed at the University of Western Australia as part of iVEC's (Interactive Virtual Environments Centre) Pawsey Centre supercomputer cluster, and represents an attempt to improve the way data is moved around and accessed within the system, according to Computerworld.

The machine sports 1152 central processing cores and 96 graphical processors across the 96 nodes of the distributed supercomputer.

One of the main bottlenecks in astronomical and biological research, particularly of the kind that the SKA would allow local scientists to carry out. is simply parsing all the data that is collected. 

This particular computer has local storage in excess of one petabyte (or a touch over one million gigabytes of data), so the system designers iVEC focused heavily on improving the way data is handled. 

In particular they wanted to allow easy access to particular data bits by researchers, even those in different locations or in different fields of study.

"A lot of the e-research activities ongoing in iVEC is actually about the management of, and setting up of, data repositories so that people in a different, or similar discipline, can find the items in your data set without having to ask you all the time,” said iVEC systems architect Guy Robinson.

These advantages would also seem to go hand in hand with the SkyNet project recently announced by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, which will attempt to tap into the spare processing power of our regular old desktop computers.

IVEC was established in 2000 as a project between Central TAFE, the CSIRO, Curtin University and UWA. It has since been joined by Murdoch University and receives funding from the Western Australian Government.

[Computerworld]