Facilities
The Centre is uniquely resourced with facilities unlike any other astrophysics research group in the country.
Observing
Swinburne's Vice-Chancellor and the Centre for Astronomy and
Supercomputing's Director have signed an MOU with Caltech which will
see extensive collaboration in radio and optical astronomy over the
next 5 yrs. This will include access to the world's largest and most
powerful optical telescope: the twin 10m telescopes of the W. M. Keck
Observatory for up to 20 nights a year. The observatory is situated at
4205m above sea level (above 60% of the Earth's atmosphere) on the
summit of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano. Access to this class of
telescope will enable Swinburne astronomers to see objects further
away and with more detail than has previously been possible for
Australian observers. Swinburne astronomers will be the first group in
Australia to have guaranteed access to the Keck telescopes.
Supercomputing
The Centre runs and owns one of the most powerful supercomputers in
Australia. The system is fully integrated suite of Dell PowerEdge
servers housing 64-bit quad-core Clovertown technology. The supercomputer
comprises over 1000 processors (a theoretical 10 Teraflop machine). This
massive processing power is connected with a state of art networking
infrastructure built on gigabit ethernet and a large collection of high
speed disk arrays. The Centre also has close ties with the Victorian
& Australian Partnerships for Advanced Computing (VPAC & APAC).
Visualisation
Located at the Centre is the Swinburne Virtual Reality Theatre which houses
immersive visualisation facilities. Supported by a visualisation research staff,
the Centre has the ability to use the power of 3D visualisation to analyse,
interpret and explain complex 3D datasets for reserch and public outreach.