WESTERN Australian supercomputing hub iVEC is now primed to become one of the most advanced in the world, after the announcement of a massive funding boost from the State Government last Thursday.

New Commerce Minister Bill Marmion MLA declared a further $3.616 million funding for iVEC (Interactive Virtual Environments Centre), on top of the previous $80 million injection from the Federal Government’s Super Science scheme.

iVEC is set to see an exponential increase in capabilities / Image: Courtesy iVEC

iVEC chief executive officer Andrew Rohl says the centre is “over the moon” about the State Government’s level of support.

“The $80 million from the Federal Government is for the Pawsey Centre but it is only for infrastructure,” Professor Rohl says.

“Not one dollar can be spent on actually operating it. This means things like electricity bills, which are pretty big expenses in this kind of project.

“So the extra funding will allow us to harness the opportunity of having this very large facility.”

Prof Rohl says the funding for the Pawsey Centre will increase the level of iVEC’s high performance computing by 250 times.

The Centre will facilitate areas such as geosciences, atomic physics, nanosciences, bioinformatics and engineering.

Geosciences will be a large focus, to help evolve the State’s ever-growing mining and resources sector.

However, one quarter of the Centre’s resources have already been dedicated to the Square Kilometre Array, a massive coup for Australia’s bid to host the project.

Minister Marmion says the funding will also “…help process and manage the large amounts of data from the Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope, which CSIRO is currently building.”

Prof Rohl says iVEC’s aim is to acquire and house one of the top 20 computers in the world.

“Moving forward, Australia will have three world-class computing centres (including Victoria and Canberra) in the next two years,” he says.

“A lot is happening around this very large investment.

“It allows us to transition from where we are today into petascale computing.”

Comments (2)

...
written by Igor Bray, May 27, 2010

A fantastic result for computational scientists generally. Well done Andrew, and thanks to the Minister, Bill Marmion, who has been in the role for only a short time.

...
written by Adam Osseiran, May 28, 2010

Great news for WA research and sensible move from the Minister. It would be a shame to have such good infrastructures in WA and not have means or people to operate them.