ARARAT - Ararat born physicist, Joseph Lade Pawsey's distinguished career in radio astronomy has been acknowledged with the naming of a new super computer centre to be based in Perth.
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Mr Pawsey was born in 1908 in Ararat to a family of farmers and attended state schools at Coleraine and Camperdown, before going on to graduate with a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne and then a doctorate at Cambridge University.
The Pawsey Centre will comprise a purpose-built building housing a petascale supercomputing system, which will be used to support the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope.
The $2.5 billion SKA telescope will be deployed in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa it was announced last week.
The telescope aims to address fundamental questions about the evolution of the Universe including the formation of black holes, the origins of the first stars and the generation of magnetic fields in space.
As part of the Super Science Initiative, the Gillard government allocated $80 million to West Australian supercomputing leader iVEC to establish the Pawsey Centre in the state.
When complete in June 2013, the supercomputing resources of the centre are expected to rank in the top 20 supercomputing facilities in the world.
