Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre

📣The new Nectar node at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is now live! Pawsey joins 9 federated nodes of the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar), which provides powerful computing services for research, designed to save time, boost computing resources and support collaboration. In the last financial year, Nectar had over 3,900 users and supported 1,900 research projects. The new node is an outcome of the MOU signed between ARDC and Pawsey in 2024. Both organisations are enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Rosie Hicks, CEO, ARDC, said, “The launch of the new ARDC Nectar Research Cloud node at Pawsey marks an exciting step forward for Australian research. By extending Nectar to Western Australia (WA), we’re strengthening national collaboration and enabling researchers to integrate cloud and high-performance computing. This partnership will accelerate innovation and deliver powerful, connected capabilities for data-driven discovery.” Mark Stickells AM, CEO, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, said, “Pawsey's partnership with ARDC increases advanced computing resources and services available to our partners and researchers nationally. Researchers across all domains are using more computation to power their research, and the new WA Nectar Research Cloud node at Pawsey will accelerate impactful scientific discovery in WA and nationally.” 🚀ARDC Nectar Research Cloud — Powering Australian Research The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is a federated service that is co-designed and receives co-investment from universities and research infrastructure facilities across Australia. The federation enables cross-institutional research collaboration at a national scale. Nectar hosts powerful computing services for researchers, designed to save time, boost computing resources, and promote collaboration. They include services to run virtual desktops, Jupyter Notebooks, BinderHub, GPUs, and preemptible instances. Nectar also provides infrastructure for national services through the ARDC Thematic Research Data Commons and is used by research organisations across the country, including: - 37 Australian universities - 15 NCRIS facilities  - 11 ARC Centres of Excellence. All Australian researchers can try Nectar with a 6-month trial, and Nectar offers ongoing access to researchers in all fields of research at no cost to eligible researchers. Learn more and join upcoming Nectar training 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gDwQN3Uq #NCRISimpact

AMD, UNSW Sydney, and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre are opening a new chapter in genomics with Slorado, the world’s first fully open-source tool for real-time nanopore DNA decoding. Built on AMD GPUs and the ROCm open software platform, Slorado enables researchers to analyze nanopore sequencing data faster and on any GPU hardware. Demonstrated on Pawsey’s Setonix supercomputer, powered by AMD Instinct GPUs and ROCm, Slorado decoded a full human genome dataset in just 2.3 hours and only 0.8 hours on our newer MI300X GPUs—dramatically accelerating genomic research and making large-scale DNA analysis more accessible than ever. Explore how AMD is advancing open science and discovery: https://lnkd.in/ghSRHX7S

🌏 Pawsey Wrap of the Week Last week, Team Pawsey moved from global supercomputing insights in St Louis to inspiring connections between past and present interns back home — highlighting the talent and innovation driving Australia’s digital research future. 🎓Summer Internship Program kicks off Yesterday, we welcomed 12 new interns and 2 mentors to the 2025 Summer Internship Program, starting the day with introductions before embarking on a behind-the-scenes Pawsey tour. We were joined on the tour by 9 Curtin HIVE interns and 12 TAFE students, bringing great energy and curiosity to the centre. The day wrapped up with a special 25th Anniversary Sundowner, where past interns returned to celebrate and share insights during a panel featuring one Team Pawsey and Intern supervisor, Cristian Di Pietrantonio and two former interns from The University of Western Australia and Curtin University, Allison Ng and Sean Oldenburger, a fantastic way to connect our newest cohort with Pawsey’s growing community. 🔗 https://bit.ly/4pvlG67 🚀 Pawsey at SC25, St Louis Chris Schlipalius, Deva Kumar Deeptimahanti and Edric Matwiejew represented Pawsey on the world stage at SC25, connecting with international partners and exploring the future of high-performance computing and quantum technologies. While there, Edric joined a panel hosted by SDxCentral on Quantum integration with HPC, diving into how high-performance systems could help tackle the challenge of quantum error correction. 🔗 Read more: https://bit.ly/4pqYkyz 🔢 Setonix leads Australia in the Top500 The November 2025 rankings were released at the Conference, and Setonix continues to shine, placing #66 in the world and #30 on the Green500 for energy-efficient supercomputing. Australia was well represented overall, with CSIRO's Virga (#121), National Computational Infrastructure's Gadi (#179) and Spartan (#332) joining Setonix on the global list. 🎙️ Mark Stickells on Debate@Go8 Pawsey CEO Mark Stickells AM joined The Group of Eight’s Debate@Go8 podcast to discuss the power of supercomputing and its impact on our daily lives. During the conversation, Mark highlighted how supercomputing accelerated COVID-19 vaccine development by replacing thousands of traditional petri-dish experiments with advanced digital modelling. ⚡ Advancing hybrid quantum–classical computing NVIDIA announced global adoption of NVQLink, a new universal interconnect powering next-generation quantum–classical workflows. Pawsey is proud to be part of this effort, leveraging NVQLink to support research through our Quantum Supercomputing Innovation Hub and the Setonix-Q Pilot Scheme. 🔗 https://bit.ly/4pBqGqd #Pawsey25 #HPC #Supercomputing #AustralianScience #Quantum

At the 10th annual ABACBS - Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society conference in Adelaide, catching up with great colleagues Jake Bradford and Michael Roach who I usually only see in a zoom window! Looking forward to presenting a hands-on workshop with Australian BioCommons on Thursday morning about leveraging #supercomputing for #structuralBiology using Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre’s AMD GPU cluster. Thanks to Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, and for all the presenters and organisers for making it happen. #bioinformatics #biology #hpc #computationalbiology #gpu #alphafold #ai

🗣️ Our Quantum Supercomputing Researcher Edric Matwiejew was in St. Louis, Missouri representing Pawsey at SC Conference Series' SC25. Speaking at 'The Quantum Era of HPC' panel, Edric shared the stage with RIKEN's Mitsuhisa Sato, IBM's Antonio Corcoles, Quantinuum K.K.'s Kentaro Yamamoto, QuEra Computing Inc.'s Yuval Boger and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)'s Ermal Rrapaj. Topics surrounding quantum computing, including bits versus qubits and error correction, covered a lot of ground surrounding what quantum specialists are focusing on. https://lnkd.in/gWD_srp7 #Quantum #HPC #Supercomputing 

📃 Australia’s national supercomputing facilities – the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Canberra and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth – have recorded an unprecedented demand for compute time in their 2026 National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS). 🔢 The collective demand of more than 2.2 billion compute hours exceeded the annual NCMAS compute share on NCI's Gadi and Pawsey's Setonix by nearly 3 times. Demand for each facility exceeds 1 billion compute hours for the first time, highlighting NCMAS's critical role in national research – and the growing need for high-performance computing (HPC) in driving innovative science across Australia. #NCRISimpact #NCMAS #research #researchinfrastructure #collaboration

We are proud to be part of Western Australia’s vision for a connected, future-ready science and technology ecosystem. The State’s continued support helps us to deliver world-class supercomputing expertise to universities and government departments across WA, while also helping to build skills among current and future researchers. We encourage you to explore the 10-Year Science and Technology Plan. At Pawsey, we are excited to continue partnering with government, universities and industry to build Australia's scientific capability and maintain our position at the forefront of global research infrastructure.

🌟 From national science celebrations to sector-wide engagement and community events, last week highlighted how Pawsey’s expertise, partnerships, and infrastructure support Australia’s research ecosystem from end to end. 🏆 Pawsey is proud to sponsor the Premier’s Science Awards, and last night we joined in celebrating Western Australia’s leading researchers as the 2025 winners were announced. We extend our warm congratulations to all award recipients, and we were especially pleased to see two long-standing Pawsey users recognised: Professor Jacqueline Batley (UWA), Scientist of the Year, and Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi (UWA), People's Choice Award. Pawsey was represented on the night by Mark Stickells AM, CEO, and Sarah Beecroft, Pawsey’s Bioinformatics Specialist, who were honoured to support this celebration of scientific excellence in Western Australia 🔗 Read more on our previous post: https://bit.ly/3LKrevi 🌏 The WA Climate Science Initiative Showcase featured Pawsey's infrastructure and expertise. At the event hosted by Murdoch University, presenters stressed the critical role of sovereign, national HPC capability—highlighting that work of this scale and precision simply isn’t possible without dedicated facilities like Pawsey. 🔗 See the full event wrap: https://bit.ly/47MUeLt 🧬 Sarah Beecroft hosted a full-day Intermediate R workshop in partnership with COMBINE Australia and The University of Western Australia Centre for Applied Bioinformatics, at Pawsey, drawing 35 attendees with a substantial waitlist, highlighting strong demand for bioinformatics training supported by Pawsey infrastructure. 🎤 Our Strategic Communications Lead, Karina Nunez, chaired the annual NCRIS Communications Network Forum, strengthening national collaboration across Australia’s research infrastructure communications community. 🔗 Read the full wrap here: https://bit.ly/4i2AqXK 🎓 Karina also attended the Australian Science Communicators Conference before joining the team at the National Computational Infrastructure in Canberra for planning and engagement that also included a visit from Science & Technology Australia team members, Lucy Guest and Sarah Tynan. 🌐 From scientific excellence to national strategy, another strong week of capability, communication and connection at Pawsey. #Pawsey #HPC #Supercomputing #NCRIS #ClimateScience #STEM #ScienceEngagement #PremierScienceAwards #ASC2025 #ResearchInfrastructure #SovereignCapability #Setonix #NCRISimpact

✨ Celebrating WA’s outstanding scientific excellence The winners of the 2025 Premier’s Science Awards have been announced, and Pawsey proudly congratulates all recipients across Western Australia. These awards continue to highlight the world-class research, innovation and community engagement driving our State forward. 🏆 Science Engagement Initiative of the Year – ‘Keep Carnaby’s Flying: Ngoolarks Forever’ (Murdoch University) Pawsey CEO Mark Stickells had the honour of presenting this award to the team on behalf of Team Pawsey. Over two years, this initiative raised awareness of the plight of Carnaby’s cockatoos and empowered communities to protect Perth’s threatened black cockatoos. Achievements include planting ~50,000 black cockatoo food-plants, establishing city-wide bird drinking stations, and developing science-informed Conservation Action Plans now being implemented by local councils. We are especially excited to celebrate long-standing users of Pawsey’s supercomputing facilities: 🏆 Scientist of the Year – Professor Jacqueline Batley (The University of Western Australia) Professor Batley is an internationally recognised leader in plant genomics. Her research uses Pawsey’s computing systems to analyse large-scale genome datasets, applying machine learning to uncover the genetic traits that improve disease resistance, crop productivity and food security. Her work is shaping the future of sustainable agriculture in Australia and globally. 🏆 People’s Choice Award – Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi (The University of Western Australia) A pioneer in WA oceanography and one of the first HPC experts in WA, Professor Pattiaratchi has been with Pawsey since the very beginning, making his win especially meaningful as we celebrate 25 years of supporting WA’s research community. Today, he continues to use Pawsey to run advanced coastal and ocean-circulation models that improve predictions of tides, storm surges, waves, and extreme water levels around Australia, which are vital for coastal planning, marine safety, and climate resilience. 🌐 Pawsey is proud to support and celebrate Western Australia’s scientific community. Congratulations to all 2025 Premier’s Science Awards winners for your leadership, impact and dedication to advancing STEM in WA. #PremierScienceAwards #Pawsey #WAscience #STEMinWA #HPC #Supercomputing #ResearchImpact #ScienceExcellence #MachineLearning #NCRISimpact

🌏 Pawsey at the WA Climate Science Initiative Showcase Last week, Pawsey proudly joined the Western Australian Climate Science Initiative (CSI) event, where our team — Mark Stickells AM, Maciej Cytowski, Aditi Subramanya, Pratibha Raghunandan, Greg Orange and Christopher Harris — celebrated the collaboration driving some of the state’s most advanced climate projections. Over 60 attendees from the WA Government, research organisations and the community heard about CSI’s achievements and the critical role of high-performance computing in understanding our future climate. Over the past three years, the project has used 150 million service units on Setonix to downscale information from six global climate models across three human-driven CO₂ emissions scenarios, producing projections out to 2100. These projections are already informing analyses of rainfall changes in WA’s South-West, and supporting work on urban heat island modelling and fire-risk prediction. Pawsey CEO Mark Stickells AM discussed the critical role of sovereign HPC for evidence-based government decision-making and future policy planning. Associate Professor Jatin Kala (Murdoch University) also reinforced the importance of sovereign High Performance Computing (#HPC) capability for Australia, noting: “You can’t do this work on a desktop. You need a national facility. If we were to go to a commercial provider … it would have cost many, many, many millions of dollars.” He also emphasised that CSI’s achievements rely not only on infrastructure, but on the expertise and support of the Pawsey team: “It's very, very technical work, so without them we would not have been able to achieve any of that, so university and state government partnerships with a centre like Pawsey are critical; we can't do any of it without these partnerships.” The CSI project now holds over 7 PB of climate data on Pawsey systems, with subsets shared nationally via the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). These resources are already guiding researchers, industry and policymakers as they plan for Western Australia’s future. Pawsey is proud to partner with the WA Government and the research community to deliver the advanced climate science that informs our state’s future—and to demonstrate why sovereign, secure, and specialised HPC infrastructure remains irreplaceable for Australia. #ResearchImpact #HPC #Supercomputing #AustralianScience #Pawsey #Climatescience