Mark Stickells, Executive Director of the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre signing the MoU in Perth, Western Australia and Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC signing the MoU in CSC’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland. Photo: CSC website.
The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Western Australia and CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in a collaborative partnership to achieve strategic global objectives.
The two organisations wish to implement a fruitful exchange of information regarding supercomputers, solely for peaceful purposes to promote research and development, solve highly advanced computing solutions, enhance the productivity of global research and efficiencies.
In 2021, CSC will be the host site for the LUMI supercomputer, a pre-exascale machine for processing big data featuring European software solutions and Finnish innovation in the data center design, making the LUMI data center one of the most ecological data centers in the world. LUMI is also set to be one of the world’s best known scientific instruments for the lifespan of 2021–2026.
Setonix, is Pawsey’s newest HPE Cray EX supercomputer. With a peak of 50 petaflops of compute power, it will be the fastest research supercomputer by far in Australia and across the Southern Hemisphere.
Both LUMI and Setonix are based on the same, unprecedented supercomputing architecture, meaning this collaboration offers mutual benefit in an ideas exchange, best practices, research optimisation, training, industrial use of high performance computing (HPC) and linkages between HPC and scientific instruments.
The foundation of both supercomputers is built upon GPU acceleration, enabling high performance computing, artificial intelligence, high performance data analytics and visualisation.
The partnership also commits to identify opportunities to improve the operational efficiency of each of the parties, and to provide enhanced support for globally distributed research teams.
Pawsey’s Executive Director, Mark Stickells signed the MoU in Perth, Western Australia during a live call to CSC’s Managing Director, Kimmo Koski in Espoo, Finland.
Mark Stickells said the agreement reflects Pawsey’s collaborative nature as an internationally recognised supercomputing research facility.
Mark Stickells said “this partnership will help both centres deliver advanced solutions to national and global research, with large impacts on researchers and their scientific outcomes. By working together, we take another step forward in accelerating scientific discovery and aiding humanity”.
Kimmo Koski said “bearing in mind the international nature of science, we are excited about this partnership which will foster the use of HPC globally. We are looking forward to make the most out of LUMI, and this MoU is supporting our endeavour towards this goal.”
About Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre
The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is a world-class high-performance computing facility accelerating scientific discoveries for Australia's researchers. Pawsey will be home to Australia’s most powerful Tier 1 research supercomputer facilities, supporting science of national and international importance, such as the Square Kilometre Array via its precursor projects, the ASKAP and Murchison Widefield Array telescopes.
The Centre serves over 1600 researchers achieving unprecedented results, in domains such as radio astronomy, energy and resources, engineering, bioinformatics and health sciences.
Pawsey’s work enables science and accelerates discovery to help scientists address tomorrow’s challenges with answers today.
About CSC – IT Center for Science
CSC – IT Center for Science is a Finnish center of expertise in information technology owned by the Finnish state and higher education institutions. We provide internationally high-quality ICT expert services for higher education institutions, research institutes, culture, public administration and enterprises. www.csc.fi
One of the pan-European pre-exascale supercomputers, LUMI, is located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland. Visit LUMI at www.lumi-supercomputer.eu.
This article was first published on October 14 by CSC.
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