The Pawsey Centre will lead to an increase iVEC’s computational capacity by at least a factor of a thousand over the next three years. The biggest challenge faced by iVEC is ensuring that WA researchers are in a position to effectively use such supercomputers. This is a daunting challenge, as it requires a paradigm shift for researchers to highly parallel computer programs. This Program will be tasked to both keep abreast of the leading edge advances in supercomputer architecture and programming paradigms and to assist WA researchers to either develop computer codes that can scale to thousands of processors or use leading community codes that are known to scale.

These services will be delivered by a team of Supercomputing Development and Applications Specialists. These specialists will work collaboratively with researchers that want to extend their research to harness the power of petascale supercomputers. The researchers will be required to make a matching time commitment to the project. This program will also work collaboratively with the Education Program to turn the learnings from the projects into coursework, providing valuable resources to raise the expertise of the WA research community.