The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), a government supercomputing initiative, has attracted A$50m ($32.8m) in private funding in addition to the A$20m ($13m) initially pledged by the government.
APAC, which will be based at the Australian National University in Canberra, will acquire the largest supercomputer the country has seen to date at a cost of about A$14m ($9m) with IBM Corp, Fujitsu Ltd and Sun Microsystems Inc on a shortlist to provide it. The rest of the A$70m ($45.4m) will be spent on staffing to support researchers and businesses wanting to use the network.
APAC’s executive director, John O’Callaghan said: Our mission is to get Australia into the top 10 countries worldwide in terms of computing power and with these contributions we will probably be in the top eight in the next three years.
APAC intends to build its supercomputing power to a teraflop, or a million million floating point operations per second, within three years. It also plans to establish a network with national and international partners.
