HPE will deliver a supercomputing cluster to support the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope in Australia.

The AU$2m ($1.3m) deployment comes ahead of an AU$70 million (US$46m) supercomputing refresh at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

Clusters for arrays

"The new MWA cluster at Pawsey will feature 156 of the latest generation of Intel [Xeon Gold 6230] CPUs and 78 cutting-edge [Nvidia V100] GPUs with more high-bandwidth memory, internal high-speed storage and more memory per node," Mark Stickells, Pawsey executive director, said.

546 teraflops MWA cluster will take up two racks in the Pawsey facility. The supercomputing center is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia.

"As a researcher, I am excited that this new infrastructure will give us the chance to accelerate our workflows, leading to faster scientific discoveries and for providing the opportunity to continue to use the MWA as a scientific, technical, and operational testbed for the future Square Kilometre Array," Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, MWA director, said.

The MWA and ASKAP telescopes are precursors to the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest public science data project. It will require two supercomputers with a combined performance of 250 petaflops.