An Australian supercomputer has been recognised as one of the greenest computers in the world after ranking in the top five on a global benchmark list for efficient high-performance computing.
Celebrating the news, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said the Setonix supercomputer at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre was ranked fourth in the world on the Green500 list.
The Research Centre is a joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia.
CSIRO said Setonix was also named the most powerful public research supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, ranking 15 in the global Top500 list.
“The ranking means once fully available to researchers in early 2023, Setonix will enable high-impact research in domains such as radio astronomy, energy and resources, engineering, bioinformatics, health sciences and climate science while lowering its environmental impact,” CSIRO said.
“The new supercomputer is being installed in two stages,” it said.
“Since completion of the first stage of the system earlier this year, researchers have already used Setonix to produce a world-first, highly detailed image of a supernova remnant captured using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Western Australia.”
CSIRO said that at peak performance, Setonix would provide ‘massively parallel compute’ – equivalent to hundreds of thousands of standard computers working in unison for research, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Setonix will deliver enough compute power to do in a second a calculation that would take a human 1.5 billion years to achieve,” the CSIRO said.
