WA government invests $10 million into SKA project

The Western Australian Government has poured $10.8 million into roads, power and optic fibre infrastructure aimed at developing Australia and New Zealand's joint bid for the $2.1 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

State innovation minister, John Day, said the funding, included as part of the state budget last week, would further enhance the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), one of the pilot telescopes ahead of the project proper.

“This infrastructure is critical to the success of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an important precursor project to the SKA,” Day said in a statement. “The new roads, power and optic fibre infrastructure will link the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, ASKAP and potentially the SKA to the world, while also benefiting Mid-West communities.”

State and federal governments have poured more than $350 million in grants for the project, the most recent investment being the Federal Government's additional $40.2 million in funding as part of the 2011-2012 budget last week. CSIRO has also moved toward procuring elements of the second stage Pawsey Centre supercomputer project, which would rely on graphic processors to provide hundreds of teraflops in processing power required to crunch the exabyte of data expected to result from the project daily once complete.

The Pawsey Centre project is also set to be complemented by a ‘citizen science’ application to be released this year, which will be based on the open source Nereus V Cloud computing technology developed at Oxford University.

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