ONE of the world's most powerful supercomputers is planned for Perth.

The supercomputer will process vast amounts of data being collected by radio telescopes in Western Australia's Murchison region.

It will be housed in the $80 million Pawsey Centre being built at Technology Park in the southern Perth suburb of Kensington, near Curtin University.

The Pawsey Centre machines will initially process data from existing radio telescopes based at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) but floor space is being kept free to expand them for use in the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project.

The existing telescopes are precursors to the SKA and include the Murchison Widefield Array and Australian SKA Pathfinder projects.

The supercomputer will be overseen by iVEC, a joint venture between the CSIRO and four public Perth universities, and is being funded by the WA government.

Paul Nicholls, acting executive director of iVEC, said the supercomputer would be bought and assembled in instalments to ensure only the most up-to-date technology was used.

Collectively, the Pawsey machines were expected to have 1.5 petaflops of computing power - one petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion operations per second - when assembled and installed in 2014, Mr Nicholls said.

"It is then hoped that the SKA international project will contribute funding to fill up the rest of the floor being made available at the Pawsey Centre," Mr Nicholls said.

"The SKA is now in the design phase, which will hopefully include a big increase in the compute power needed for the Australian component and that's why we've left space in the Pawsey Centre."

It was decided in May that WA would share the $2 billion project with South Africa and New Zealand.

Comprising 3000 dishes and with a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the best contemporary instruments, the SKA will observe such things as what happened after the big bang and how galaxies evolved, and will attempt to uncover more about the ``dark matter'' that fills the majority of the universe.

Mr Nicholls said the SKA project presented great opportunities for disciplines other than radioastronomy including geoscience and nanochemistry.

"Off the back of investments driven by the SKA project requirements, we also hope to see research and development of technologies in other domains."

For instance, wi-fi technology was developed by Australian radioastronomers at CSIRO seeking an efficient way to transfer data and there could be similar breakthroughs stemming from the huge computing requirements of the SKA, he said.

"We're hoping that the pushing of technology off the SKA project will lead to spin offs: better energy efficiency in computing, new materials for computers, and improved communications and networking technologies."