Technologies

Now That's a Computer

On the pupil-free day in Week 3, staff were involved in a variety of activities focused on planning for the coming year and some of us in the Technologies Department took the opportunity to venture off campus to see something quite spectacular. Mr Liam Mackenzie, Mrs Samantha Eloff and I visited the team at Pawsey, located in the Bentley Technology Park precinct. Pawsey is a supercomputing research centre, funded by the government and working with CSIRO and all four universities in Western Australia, with the primary function of accelerating scientific research to benefit Australia.

Whilst at Pawsey, we were introduced to their supercomputer - one of the most powerful computers in the world. It was amazing to see in real life, a computer so power, performing 1 x 10 (to the power of 15) operations per second.

The education team at Pawsey have invited us back, this time with students in tow, as they'd love to show off this amazing technology to eager young minds. Pawsey employs people with lots of different skills, and can offer so many future career opportunities, not necessarily just in computer science. It is our hope to have excursions to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in the very near future, possibly even at the end of this year.

As for the below photos, Mr Liam Mackenzie is holding a CPU worth a cool $50,000and Mrs Samantha Eloff is admiring a $1.5 million TV screen (I think she's trying to work out where she'd put it in her house).

Mrs S Mark

(Head of Learning Area - Technologies)