Want to store up to 2000 years of iTunes music? You would think that’s impossible but you haven’t met the new supercomputer installed at the University of Western Australia (UWA). The new supercomputer is said to be 10, 000 times faster than the average computer, and yes, it can store two millennia of music.

But the “Fornax” isn’t intended to store downloads from Apple’s music store. The supercomputer is part of the Pawsey project funded by $80 million from the Australian Federal Government designed to help bolster’s the country bid to build the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), “world’s biggest radio telescope” in Western Australia and make Perth one of the world’s top 20 supercomputing centres next year.

“Fornax,” which means “hot furnace” in Latin, is named after a southern hemisphere constellation known as a birthplace of stars . The UWA installation consists of 96 nodes, each containing two Intel 6-core Xeon X5650 processors, a high-end GPU and 48GB of RAM.

UWA, the CSIRO and three other WA public universities are partners in a joint venture called iVEC to provide advanced computing services to scientists, industry and government.

Paul Bourke, associate professor and the director of UWA’s iVEC Centre, said Fornax would give researchers unprecedented access to high-powered, data-intensive computing, particularly for astronomy signal processing (including the SKA) and geo-science research.

He said Fornax had a theoretical performance equivalent to 10,000 office desktop computers, and global file storage big enough to store 2000 years of iTunes music.

Fornax is installed at the iVEC@UWA Centre in UWA’s Physics Building.

Professor Bourke said it would help Perth gain a unique capability in Australian computing history in 2013 with the installation of a new iVEC petascale supercomputer – significantly faster than Fornax – to be housed in the Pawsey Centre next to the CSIRO Australian Resources Research Centre in Kensington.