Uni logs on to super computer

Storing 2000 years of iTunes music? No problem.

At a time when we can fit in our pocket the kind of computing power that would have taken up an entire room 30 years ago, a $4 million computer that takes up a 67sqm office at the University of WA packs some serious punch.

Fornax is the new machine being installed by supercomputing group iVEC as part of an $80 million project aimed at boosting Australia's bid for the Square Kilometre Array telescope.

A decision on which country will have the telescope is expected by next month.

Fornax has more than a million gigabytes of hard disk storage - the same as 500,000 iPod shuffles or space for one billion family photos.

That storage and its speed - 4600GB RAM, or 575 times more RAM than a top-of-the-range home computer - means it will be capable of dealing with the data-intensive problems faced by radio astronomers and geoscientists.

The director of iVEC at UWA, Paul Bourke, said the computer, alongside Epic, a $5 million computer installed at Murdoch in 2010, would help WA researchers prepare and develop code and programs for the third and biggest computer, the Pawsey Centre supercomputing facility at Technology Park.