IVEC

iVEC was the government-supported high-performance computing national facility located in Perth, Western Australia. iVEC supported researchers in Western Australia and across Australia through the Pawsey Centre and resources across the partner facilities. iVEC was rebranded to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in December 2014.

iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia. Funding comes from the joint venture partners, the Western Australian Government and the Australian Government. iVEC services are free to members of the joint venture. Free access to supercomputers is also available to researchers across Australia via a competitive merit process. Services are also provided to industry and government.

iVEC provides infrastructure to support a computational research workflow. This includes supercomputers and cloud computing, data storage and visualisation. The infrastructure is located at the joint venture members, linked by a dedicated high speed network.

iVEC is an integral component of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomy telescopes. A dedicated network links the telescopes directly to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, where the data is processed, stored and remotely visualised. This network is operated by AARNet, with the Perth-Geraldton link funded by the Australian Government Regional Blackspot Program.

IVEC was established in June 2000 as an unincorporated joint venture among Central TAFE, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Curtin University and The University of Western Australia (UWA). The Government of Western Australian was a major supporter of the venture, contributing $1 million cash that leveraged $1 million of Commonwealth funding through iVEC becoming a partner in the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC). The IVEC partners also contributed $1 million. The Premier of Western Australia officially opened IVEC in May 2002. IVEC was an acronym; the Interactive Virtual Environments Centre.