Australia’s Setonix supercomputer – named after Western Australia’s favorite animal, the quokka – recently created a highly detailed image of a supernova remnant immediately after the computing system’s first stage was made available to researchers. It used data from CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, which is owned and operated by Australia’s national science agency.
This new supercomputer is being installed in two stages, with the first one being already underway, while the second is expected to be completed later this year. By just deploying this first phase, Setonix has increased the computing power of the Pawsey Centre by 45%. ASKAP is currently finishing up a series of pilot surveys before undertaking even larger and deeper surveys of the sky. The Setonix supercomputer will be used to process all of the data collected by ASKAP. For an actual photo, NASA’s Hubble did capture this fading supernova.
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Processing data from ASKAP’s astronomy surveys is a great way to stress-test the Setonix system and see what is possible. The speed at which we reproduced our current workflows is a good sign as we look to improve and optimise them to fully exploit Setonix’s capabilities,” said Dr Pascal Elahi, Pawsey’s supercomputing applications specialist.
