The science and research agency this week released its procurement plans for the high-end IT hardware underpinning the project. Specific technology includes tape storage, hierarchical storage management, petascale and real-time supercomputing, data analysis engines, networking and infrastructure.

Due to the complexity of the project the CSIRO intends to hold information sessions for vendors during June aimed at expediting the process of defining "state of the art systems at the leading edge of the rapidly evolving supercomputing and HPC market" and ensure all parties involved have a similar level of understanding of the project members' requirements.

The second stage of the project was announced in March, with the agency stating that the Pawsey centre would act as a real-time processing facility for data, storage and analysis of data products from the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) and other data used by researchers in the fields of geoscience, nanotechnology and biotechnology.

Along with a rich software environment including programming tools and scientific libraries the computing environment will include a mix of multi-core processors and graphic processing units (GPU) components, to aid the analysis of data.

"The data intensive role will include high bandwidth parallel file systems to aid data intensive work, such as pre/post processing of large datasets and analysis of large collections of metadata," CSIRO documents released in March read.