Introducing the Australian SKA Regional Centre
The AusSRC is an equal partnership between CSIRO, Curtin University, the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre and the University of Western Australia.
The establishment of the AusSRC Interim Board was a keystone event earlier this year. Ms Patricia Kelly was appointed as the inaugural Interim Board Chair.
Patricia brings a thorough understanding of the SKA project, having been involved in many aspects of the SKA, such as representing Australia on the Board of the SKA Organisation between 2012-2017.
Based at ICRAR and CSIRO in Perth, the Australian SKA Regional Centre (shortened to AusSRC, “Oz-S.R.C.”) is the Australian contingent of an international network of SKA Regional Centres. These Centres will be a global computing and data delivery network that will provide the connection between the SKA telescopes and the science community.
The AusSRC currently supports precursor science projects that utilise the ASKAP and MWA telescopes, and there’s a bright future ahead.
In 2021, AusSRC secured $63 million in funding from the Federal Government to establish and build up the capability of the AusSRC. Once the SKA is up and running, around 600 petabytes (that’s 600,000,000 gigabytes) will be processed and stored each year at the AusSRC for astronomers and astrophysicists from all over the world to access and analyse.
