Compute

Australia's sovereign compute capacity: HPC systems, GPU clusters, and accelerator resources accessible to Australian entities.

Total Systems

19

tracked clusters
Total Accelerators

11,181

GPUs / accelerators↑ up
Sovereign Compute

74.2 PF

AU-controlled PFLOPS↑ up
Offshore (in AU)

86.0 PF

commercial, offshore-owned→ stable

Systems by Peak PFLOPS

Sorted by peak performance. Hyperscaler counts are estimated — fleet sizes are not publicly disclosed.

AU-controlled Non-AU controlled
What is a PFLOP? A petaFLOP (PFLOP) is 10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second — the standard yardstick for supercomputer performance. One NVIDIA H100 GPU delivers ~0.034 PFLOPS of double-precision compute. Training a GPT-4-class model requires roughly 25,000 A100-equivalents running for 90 days — about 800 PFLOPS sustained. Australia's largest sovereign cluster (Pawsey Setonix) reaches 50 PFLOPS peak.

Accelerator Count by System

Number of GPUs / accelerators per cluster

Compute Context

Australia's sovereign compute is dominated by two public research systems: NCI Gadi (ANU/Canberra) and Pawsey Setonix (Perth). Both are accessible to Australian researchers via competitive merit allocation.

Commercial GPU cloud from hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) is available in Australian regions but remains foreign-owned and subject to export controls. Accelerator counts for these are estimated — the providers do not publish regional fleet sizes.

Australia has no sovereign frontier-scale GPU cluster (100k+ H100-class GPUs) needed to train large foundation models domestically.

Key gap: No Australian sovereign cluster exceeds 4,000 H100-class GPUs. The US NAIRR has 50,000+. Training a GPT-4-class model requires ~25,000 A100s for ~90 days.

All Compute Systems

SystemOperatorOwnershipAccelerator# AcceleratorsPeak PFLOPSStatusAccess
Pawsey SetonixPawsey Supercomputing Research CentreAU GovernmentAMD EPYC + AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs75750OperationalRestricted
AWS Sydney GPU Cloud (ap-southeast-2)Amazon Web ServicesOS PrivateNVIDIA A100 40GB / H100 SXM (P4d + P5 fleet)307240OperationalCommercial
Azure Australia East GPU CloudMicrosoft AzureOS PrivateNVIDIA A100 80GB / H100 (ND A100 v4 + ND H100 v5)204826OperationalCommercial
Google Cloud Australia (australia-southeast1)Google CloudOS PrivateNVIDIA A100 40GB / H100 (A2 + A3 series)153620OperationalCommercial
NCI GadiNational Computational Infrastructure (ANU)AU GovernmentIntel Xeon Cascade Lake + NVIDIA V100 GPUs24729.88OperationalGovernment Only
National AI Centre Compute PlatformNational AI Centre / CSIROAU GovernmentNVIDIA H100 SXM5 80GB5126.55OperationalRestricted
NCI Nirin GPU ClusterNational Computational Infrastructure (ANU)AU GovernmentNVIDIA A100 SXM4 80GB2002.56OperationalGovernment Only
CSIRO PetrichorCSIRO Data61AU GovernmentNVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs1281.64OperationalRestricted
UQ BunyaUniversity of QueenslandAU GovernmentAMD EPYC + NVIDIA A100 GPUs961.23OperationalRestricted
Pawsey MagnusPawsey Supercomputing Research CentreAU GovernmentIntel Xeon Phi Knights Landing01.07DecommissionedRestricted
DST AI Compute PlatformDefence Science and Technology Group (DST)AU GovernmentNVIDIA A100 / H100 GPUs640.82OperationalGovernment Only
Spartan HPCUniversity of Melbourne / Research Computing ServicesAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA A100 / V100 GPUs560.35OperationalRestricted
University of Adelaide PhoenixUniversity of AdelaideAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA A100 GPUs480.31OperationalRestricted
UNSW KatanaUniversity of New South WalesAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA A100 / V100 / K80 GPUs680.28OperationalRestricted
Monash MonARCHMonash UniversityAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs440.2OperationalRestricted
QUT HPCQueensland University of TechnologyAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA A100 GPUs320.16OperationalRestricted
RMIT PunimRMIT UniversityAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs200.1OperationalRestricted
Griffith Gowonda HPCGriffith UniversityAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA T4 GPUs160.08OperationalRestricted
Deakin DRAGO HPCDeakin UniversityAU GovernmentIntel Xeon + NVIDIA V100 GPUs120.06OperationalRestricted