Supercomputers/Systems/Australis
Australia · decommissioned · hpc
Australis
Operated by Bureau of Meteorology at Bureau of Meteorology (Melbourne) .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- -
- Rpeak
- 1.60 PFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- -
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - Cray XC40 | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | computerworld.comen.wikipedia.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon processors (exact model not disclosed in sources found) | Intel | - | Reported | itnews.com.au |
| Storage | - Cray Sonexion 2000 storage system | Cray HPENYSE
rolls up to Hewlett Packard Enterprise | - | Reported | computerworld.com |
The read
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology's first named supercomputer, a Cray XC40 with Cray Sonexion 2000 storage, contracted in mid-2015 for roughly US$59 million and brought into service on 30 June 2016 with 1.6 PFlop/s of peak performance, described by the Bureau as its operational computing capability for weather, climate, ocean and wave prediction. No submission to any TOP500 list was found for this machine despite its scale, so ranked is recorded as 0 here. It was succeeded by a four-petaflop Cray XC50/CS500 system called Australis II, delivered in 2020, which this dataset does not yet record separately; Wikipedia states the facility housing Australis was decommissioned in 2020, recorded here as the decommissioned_date though no more precise date was found. iTnews independently confirms the Cray XC40 architecture, the contract value and the 2015-to-2016 timeline that the Wikipedia account draws on, so the tier is reported. The exact processor model and core count were not found in any source fetched for this row, so both are left blank rather than guessed.
Site & facility
Bureau of Meteorology (Melbourne)
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
- Commissioned
- 2004
Change history
- 2026-09-24 Australis added, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's first Cray XC40
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| en.wikipedia.org | names system only | - |
| computerworld.com | does not name this system | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
Storage and I/O
Parallel file systems, why checkpointing dominates the write load, and the metadata failure mode nobody expects.