iVEC is the government-supported

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

national facility located in

Perth, Western Australia Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth i ...

. iVEC supported researchers in Western Australia and across Australia through the Pawsey Centre and resources across the partner facilities. iVEC was rebranded to the

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (PSC) is the government-supported high-performance computing national facility located in Perth, Western Australia. Pawsey supports researchers in Western Australia and across Australia through the Pawsey Centre ( ...

in December 2014. iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture between

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

Curtin University Curtin University, formerly known as Curtin University of Technology and Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT), is an Australian public research university based in Bentley, Perth, Western Australia. It is named after John Curtin, ...

Edith Cowan University Edith Cowan University (ECU) is a public university in Western Australia. It is named in honour of the first woman to be elected to an Australian parliament, Edith Cowan, and is the only Australian university named after a woman. Gaining univers ...

Murdoch University Murdoch University is a public university in Perth, Western Australia, with campuses also in Singapore and Dubai. It began operations as the state's second university on 25 July 1973, and accepted its first undergraduate students in 1975. Its n ...

and the

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany, Western Australia, Albany an ...

. Funding comes from the joint venture partners, the

Western Australian Government The Government of Western Australia, formally referred to as His Majesty's Government of Western Australia, is the Australian state democratic administrative authority of Western Australia. It is also commonly referred to as the WA Government o ...

and the

Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government ...

. iVEC services are free to members of the joint venture. Free access to supercomputers is also available to researchers across Australia via a competitive merit process. Services are also provided to industry and government. iVEC provides infrastructure to support a computational research workflow. This includes supercomputers and cloud computing, data storage and visualisation. The infrastructure is located at the joint venture members, linked by a dedicated high speed network. iVEC is an integral component of the

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Mid West region of Western Australia. The facility began as a technology demonstrator for the i ...

(ASKAP) and

Murchison Widefield Array The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a joint project between an international consortium of organisations to construct and operate a low-frequency radio array. 'Widefield' refers to its very large field of view (on the order of 30 degrees ac ...

(MWA) radio astronomy telescopes. A dedicated network links the telescopes directly to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, where the data is processed, stored and remotely visualised. This network is operated by AARNet, with the Perth-Geraldton link funded by the Australian Government Regional Blackspot Program.

History

IVEC was established in June 2000 as an unincorporated joint venture among Central TAFE, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Curtin University and The University of Western Australia (UWA). The Government of Western Australian was a major supporter of the venture, contributing $1 million cash that leveraged $1 million of Commonwealth funding through iVEC becoming a partner in the

Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) was an Australian organisation established in 1998 to provide advanced computing and grid infrastructure for Australian research communities. APAC was established under the Systemic Infrast ...

(APAC). The IVEC partners also contributed $1 million. The Premier of Western Australia officially opened IVEC in May 2002. IVEC was an acronym; the Interactive Virtual Environments Centre. The Premier of Western Australia announced in July 2005 that $3.1 million of State Government funds had been allocated to continue funding IVEC, in addition to almost $1.3 million from the partners and $1.2 million from APAC. This commitment was used to leverage $2.4 million of additional cash from the

Australian Research Council The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the primary non-medical research funding agency of the Australian Government, distributing more than in grants each year. The Council was established by the ''Australian Research Council Act 2001'', ...

(ARC), UWA and CSIRO for supercomputing hardware. This includes $1.3 million for a Cray XT3 from the ARC under the name Western Australian Supercomputer Program. IVEC was renamed to iVEC, with the acronym no longer being used. In May 2006, the State Treasurer, The Hon. Eric Ripper, announced that the WA Government had set aside $1.95 million per year over the next four years for iVEC. The iVEC partners, with Edith Cowan University joining and Central TAFE withdrawing, agreed to contribute nearly $1.9 million over the same period. As part of its Super Science Initiative announced in the May 2009 budget, the Australian Government allocated $80 million over the financial years 2009/10 to 2012/13 to iVEC to establish a petascale supercomputing facility (the Pawsey Centre) located at the Australian Resources Research Centre in Perth. The Western Australian Government subsequently funded iVEC through its Research Facilities Program to 2015 at ~$4 million per annum, and the joint venture partners contributed a similar total. iVEC was renamed to the

on 5 Dec 2014. The name change was to align the name of the joint venture with the facility created through the 2009-2013 Super Science funding. On 14 May 2015 the Australian Government announced $5.668M funding for 2015-2016 for the

. Also on 14 May 2015, the Western Australian Government announced funding for the

at $4.1M in 2016-2017, $4.2M in 2017-2018, and $4.3M in 2018-2019. Some funding is also received from the Australian Government through other NCRIS projects such as NeCTAR and RDSI.

Locations

The Pawsey Centre building is located in the western precinct of the

Technology Park A science park (also called a "university research park", "technology park”, "technopark", “technopole", or a "science and technology park" (STP)) is defined as being a property-based development that accommodates and fosters the growt ...

, in Kensington,

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to ...

. This building houses the majority of the IT equipment. iVEC (the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre) has staff located at all members of the joint venture. The headquarters are also in the Pawsey Centre building.

Resources

Pawsey Centre

The Pawsey Centre building comprises a purpose-built data centre, housing supercomputers and associated infrastructure at Kensington,

. The Pawsey Centre is owned by CSIRO and operated by the joint venture. It is located approximately six kilometres from the Perth central business district. The Pawsey Centre was named after the Australian radio astronomer Joseph Lade Pawsey.

Funding

The $80 million of funding for the Pawsey Centre was announced in the May 2009 Federal Budget under the Super Science Initiative. The Super Science Inititiative addresses priority areas from the 2008 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure.2008 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure
/ref> The funding comes from the Education Investment Fund (EIF) which is for strategic investment in research infrastructure. Project funding was awarded to CSIRO to build and commission the Pawsey Centre in trust for iVEC, the manager of the Pawsey Centre. The Super Science Initiative also funded $50 million towards high performance computing at the

National Computational Infrastructure The National Computational Infrastructure (also known as NCI or NCI Australia) is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI ...

in Canberra. The Pawsey Centre addresses the two priority areas of astronomy and geosciences as defined in the 2008 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure. It complements the National Compute Infrastructure, whose priority areas are climate science, earth systems and national water management.

Cooling

The Pawsey Centre was designed to use traditional water cooling towers as a reliable and cheap way to cool the supercomputers and other ICT equipment. Additional cooling technology is in use at the Pawsey Centre to reduce its environmental impact. This was achieved through the Sustainable Energy for the Square Kilometre Array (SESKA) geothermal project. The process involves pumping water with an ambient temperature of around 21 °C from the Mullaloo aquifer through an above-ground heat exchanger to provide the necessary cooling effect for the supercomputer, then re-injecting the water back into the aquifer. CSIRO estimates that using groundwater cooling to cool the supercomputer saves approximately 38.5 million litres of water every year, compared with using conventional cooling towers.

Notes and references

External links

iVEC official website
{{authority control Education in Western Australia Scientific organisations based in Australia Supercomputer sites