A new supercomputer at the Australian National University will have a processing power similar to 50,000 laptops, making it the fastest in the country.
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The new machine, set to come online in November, will offer thousands of researchers speeds ten times faster than the current model.
The National Computational Infrastructure supercomputer can be used by up to 3500 researchers at any given time to tackle problems in chemistry, mathematics, climate science, astronomy, physics and much more.
The centre's director, Sean Smith, said the new supercomputer's real strength was in the high-performance network between the computer's nodes. "What makes it super is not just the size, it's the entire interconnecting fabric which pulls the whole thing together and allows you to run these super fast calculations on a distributed machine," he said.
Professor Smith said the new machine would have large flow-on effects for science and environmental security researchers in Australia.
"It's like each hour of compute is worth six of what it was last year. [Researchers will] get that much more done on the machine.
"It's a huge shot in the arm for computational and high-performance data research in Australia," he said.
Professor Smith said large-scale computing was central to contemporary science and it was increasingly hard to separate the two.
The new computer, which will be housed at the National Computational Infrastructure building on the campus of the Australian National University, will be delivered by Fujitsu.
The federal government's National Research Infrastructure for Australia project will provide $70 million for the project.
The new computer will be called "Gadi", which means "to search for" in the language of the Ngunnawal, traditional custodians of the Canberra region.
It will replace the the NCI's current machine, Raijin, which was provided by Fujitsu in 2012.
But there will no interruption for supercomputer users because the data centre was built in 2012 with space in mind for Raijin's eventual successor.
Work started on Thursday to prepare the area for the new computer.
The university's vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, said supercomputers had a pivotal role in national research projects.
"The upgrade of this critical infrastructure will see Australia continue to play a leading role in addressing some of our greatest global challenges.
"This new machine will keep Australian research and the 5000 researchers who use it at the cutting edge," he said.
Fujitsu chief executive Mike Foster said the company had a long involvement computing technology at the university, providing the some of the university's earliest supercomputer infrastructure in the 1980s.
Jasper Lindell
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
