A respiratory virus was detected in China, quickly swelling to become the first major pandemic the world had known in decades.

Within weeks, Pawsey and fellow supercomputing facility NCI had called for research projects that could help tackle the outbreak, using NCI’s Gadi — then the most powerful supercomputer in Australia — and accelerating access to Nimbus, the Pawsey cloud service.

The cloud service was rapidly re-prioritised for research into COVID-19 and over the following months, Pawsey and NCI joined the US-led Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which pooled supercomputing power and offered it to researchers fighting the pandemic.

The second critical event was closer to home, with the announcement that HPE had secured the $48m contract to build Pawsey’s next generation supercomputer, named Setonix (Cray EX architecture).

As Western Australia’s borders tightened, and much of the world shuttered offices to work from home, Pawsey wrestled with the complexity of installing high-tech, specialist equipment when many experts simply couldn’t travel.

It was slow, frustrating work, as deadlines and deliverables hinged on case numbers and closures.

2021

But after more than a year of effort, the first stage of Setonix was deployed in late 2021, immediately increasing computing capacity at the centre by 45%.

Stage two, installed in 2022, made Setonix fully operational. With 50 petaflops — 30 times the performance of Magnus and Galaxy — Setonix became the most powerful public research supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere.

It debuted on the Top500 list at number 15, and achieved an equally impressive number 4 ranking for its green credentials, ranking it alongside the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.

2022

As Pawsey was gearing up, another significant scientific project was also taking shape in Western Australia.

The SKAO is a next-generation radio astronomy-driven Big Data facility that will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe. While plans were put in place to construct 131,000 Christmas-tree-shaped antennas in WA’s Midwest, Pawsey was providing support to research done with two Australian precursors to the SKA telescopes.

CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) were launched in late 2012 as important technological demonstrators for the SKA telescopes, on the ancestral lands of the Wajarri Yamaji People.  

Supercomputing makes it possible to develop solutions that would otherwise be unsolvable, and to have Setonix right here in WA benefits not only our research institutes, but our whole economy.

Then-WA Science Minister, now Premier Roger Cook, 2022 

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Australia benefits from having national HPC leadership and capacity in Western Australia, with a public asset that drives Australian innovation and technology, and which is engaged on a world stage with partnerships in our region and beyond. 

Tim Shanahan, Chairman

With the help of Pawsey’s earlier supercomputers, and supercharged by Setonix, the precursor instruments have been producing ground-breaking science in their own right.

Setonix has also accelerated work in a completely different area of science — quantum computing.

In 2022, Pawsey announced the installation of the world’s first room-temperature diamond-based quantum computer located on-site in a supercomputing facility, in partnership with German-Australian start-up Quantum Brilliance.

In 2023, Pawsey received a $5 million grant from the Australian Government’s NCRIS program to extend its national quantum computing innovation hub, while new partnerships were signed with quantum leaders including QuEra Computing and Xanadu.

The projects, coupled with new investment in an open-source hybrid quantum computing platform, puts Pawsey at the forefront of Australia’s exploration of quantum technologies — and its enormous possibilities for enabling science.

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