THE PROJECT
In 2012, Australia and South Africa won the right to host the Square-Kilometre Array, which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. A supercomputer was built at CSIRO’s Pawsey Centre for processing of the data, estimated to be in excess of 1017 floating point operations per second.
The energy requirements for cooling of the first stage of the Pawsey supercomputer were estimated to be 2,600 kW. A large-scale geothermal cooling system has been implemented to provide this cooling power.