The $80 million of funding for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre was announced in the May 2009 Federal Budget under the Super Science Initiative.

First soil was turned on 17 August 2009 by The Hon. Kim Carr (Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry Science and Research) and The Hon. Troy Buswell (WA Minister for Science and Innovation).

The Pawsey project consisted of two stages. The first was the purchase of two pathfinder supercomputers to determine the optimal configuration of the second phase systems. The staged approach also provided a mechanism to immediately increase iVEC’s compute capacity while building the Pawsey Centre for the stage 2 systems.

Stage 1

• A CPU-based cluster called Epic, hosted at iVEC@Murdoch. Epic is a HP Proliant system with 9600 cores and 500TB of network storage, utilising an Infiniband network. Epic entered service in mid 2011.
• A GPU-based cluster called Fornax, hosted at iVEC@UWA. Fornax is a SGI system with 96 nodes comprising a NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU with 72GB of memory. The system has 500TB of network storage utilising an Infiniband network. Fornax entered service in early 2012.

Stage 2

• A CPU-based Cray supercomputer called Galaxy, devoted to the real-time operational requirements of radio astronomy projects, namely ASKAP and MWA.
• A CPU-based Cray supercomputer, Magnus -a national resource- catering for large scale science.
• A SGI hierarchical storage system backed by SpectraLogic tape libraries.
• A SGI data analysis engine, supporting various post-processing activities on data from the supercomputers and data repository.
• Stage 2 systems entered service as of the second half of 2013.