Space-age Perth supercomputer keeps its cool to join ranks of world’s greenest.

The most powerful computer in the southern hemisphere can now boast that it is also the greenest, with the Perth-based tech titan ranked among the top five global research computers for energy efficiency.

Setonix – named after one of Western Australia’s most recognisable marsupials, the quokka (Setonix brachyurus) – will be available to researchers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth’s southern suburbs from early next year.

Phase 2 of the Setonix rollout will be completed this year, with the supercomputer available to researchers from early 2023.

The second stage of the immensely powerful supercomputer is currently being rolled out. Its first stage passed a stellar “stress test” earlier this year with flying colours, processing a monumental amount of data from CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope in fewer than five hours.

Once fully operational, Setonix will provide the equivalent power of hundreds of thousands of standard computers working in union, utilising 217,088 AMD cores and 768 graphics cores for a raw compute power of 43 petaflops (a measure of computing speed representing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second).

As one researcher put it, it would take a regular laptop roughly a quarter of a year to complete the equivalent of a minute’s work for Setonix. But that computing might comes with a hefty power bill. As well as the power needed to run the thousands of processing units, there is also the added challenge of keeping the computer cool as it crunches complex algorithms. It’s a challenge the team at Pawsey have managed to navigate using clever computer architecture, with a little help from the surrounding environment. Pawsey executive director Mark Stickells said utilising AMD MI250X graphics processing units and Milan computer processing units helps boost Setonix’s energy efficiency, with the units generating record-breaking computer speed per watt consumed. However, it is how the system is cooled that shows off the centre’s ingenuity.