April 2019 National eResearch Newsletter

From 1 April 2019, ARDC has been inviting Australian research organisations, service providers and research groups that have a passion for all things data to submit their project proposal.

Applications are open for funding under two programs:
– Transformative data collections, and
– Institutional role in data commons.

Projects of up to AU$50,000 and with a completion date of 15 September 2019 are eligible for funding.  Closing date for submissions is 1-May.

For further information see https://ardc.edu.au/project/data-and-services/.

2 May, 12:00-13:00 AEST, GenoVic:  Bioinformatics in a shared clinical system for genomics
Presenter: Natalie Thorne, PhD, Lead Specialist, Clinical Genomics, Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance
Registration at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/1437958197259367181.

14 March:  Nextflow: Scalable, Sharable and Reproducible Computational Workflows across Clouds and Clusters
Presenter: Radoslaw Suchecki, CSIRO

7 February:  Snakemake: Reproducible and Scalable Bioinformatic Workflows
Presenter: Nathan Watson-Haigh, University of Adelaide

Recordings of past webinars are available on the EMBL-ABR YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5WlFNBSfmt3e8Js8o2fFqQ.

The next monthly Tech Talk (virtually and at locations around Australia) will be held at 15:00-16:00 AEST on Friday, 3-May-19.  The topic will be announced shortly.

More information and how to rsvp (coming soon) can be seen at https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/.

This workshop addresses making Earth and Environmental Science Data accessible via machine-to-machine services: where are they at and where are they going.

It will be held on Mon 6 May, 9:30 – 17:00 AEST, Canberra

It will bring together data service providers, data service consumers, and technology and standard communities;  review current usages of a suite of web data services technologies, protocols and standards for service discovery and use;  and discuss how to more efficiently use data services to meet both the challenges of today and those of the future.

The discussed technologies or standards also apply to data beyond the earth and environment domain – other communities are more than welcome.

This is a one day pre-C3DIS workshop. More information is available here:  http://www.c3dis.com/3000.

Please register your attendance of the workshop at: http://www.c3dis.com/registration.

This is the Final Call for the 3rd E2SIP workshop will be held at CSIRO Black Mountain (Canberra) on Thursday, 9-May:  it is nearing capacity.

The Australian Earth and Environmental Science Information Partners (E2SIP) collaborates with the US-based ESIP Federation to share technologies, practices and knowledge, and build a community of practitioners primarily from the research and government sectors.  Breakout topics include drones, metadata, vocabularies, FAIR data infrastructures and big data.  The plenary sessions to set the scene and plan next steps with E2SIP.

The program is on https://confluence.csiro.au/display/E2SIP/C3DIS%2719+Workshop.  If interested please complete the form at Eventbrite (https://eoi-e2sip-workshop.eventbrite.com.au/) or contact Simon Cox (simon.cox@csiro.au).

From 10 April 2019, ARDC has been inviting organisations involved in the Australian research sector that have a passion for technologies, techniques, and services that underpin a national research data commons to submit their project proposal.  Applications close Fri 10 May.

Applicants are invited to submit project proposals that investigate the issues, current and future trends, gaps and requirements in, and for, research storage and compute infrastructures.  Projects of up to $50,000 and with a completion date of September 13 2019 are eligible for funding.

See https://ardc.edu.au/project/open-call-for-storage-and-compute-project-proposals/.

A Q&A Webinar addressing Storage and Compute Infrastructure Discovery Activities will be held on Thu 18 Apr, 13:00 – 14:00 AEST.

Register at https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/86056974083428877.

AARNet has combined with Cisco to successfully demonstrate 600 Gigabits per second (Gbps) on the AARNet production network under real world conditions, without interruption to any customer traffic.

This ground-breaking terrestrial trial is a first for Australia and proves the future scalability of the AARNet network.  The trial opens up opportunities for AARNet to provide customers with unprecedented levels of scale to support massive data flows for data-intensive projects such as the Square Kilometre Array.

This is a far cry from the 48 Kilobits per second used as the backbone when AARNet pioneered the Internet in Australia 30 years ago, back in 1989.

For further information, see
https://news.aarnet.edu.au/aarnet-trials-600-gigabit-over-live-networks-with-cisco/.

Are you building software solutions for research?  Join us in Christchurch, NZ on 5-6 September!

New Zealand eScience Infrastructure’s 2019 Science Coding Conference is where scientific programmers, software engineers, developers, IT managers, coding enthusiasts and big data analysts gather in one place to share and discuss how they’re supporting the research ecosystem.  Our Call for Submissions is now open and we welcome abstracts for lightning talks, presentations, Birds-of-a-Feather, and workshops on a variety of topics.

More information: http://sciencecodingconference.nz/submissions/.

The two-year Visualising Australasia’s Soils project, funded by the Soil CRC, will create a web portal to access shared public and private soil datasets.

Federation University Australia’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) is leading the project and hosted a kick-off workshop at Ballarat from 11 to 14 February.  More than 30 participants from partner organisations attended, some travelling from as far away as New Zealand, Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Canberra and Tasmania.

See the Soil CRC website (https://www.soilcrc.com.au/projects-2/) for more information (scroll down to Project 2.3.01).

The 2019 Australasian Leadership Computing Symposium (ALCS) will be a unique event for the Australian computational science community.

Taking place from the 6th to the 8th of November at the Australian Academy of Science and The Australian National University in Canberra, ALCS 2019 will be Australia’s national research supercomputing users’ forum, as well as a flagship promotion of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data (HPD) in Australia.

Find out more on the event website at https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/Australasian+Leadership+Computing+Symposium+2019.

Developed by the City of Ballarat with technical support from Federation University Australia’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI), Honouring Our Anzacs website marks the Centenary of Anzac, and will assist the public in accessing the stories of Ballarat servicemen and servicewomen who participated in the First World War.  The website documents the fascinating history behind the development of the Avenue of Honour, and later, the erection of the Arch of Victory and the pivotal efforts by the “Lucas Girls” (employees of the E. Lucas & Co. textile company).

The novelty for users of the Honouring Our Anzacs site is the opportunity to conduct a search for a family member or former serviceperson and instantly receive a map pinpointing the location of their tree on the Avenue of Honour, including tree number and accompanied by biographical details.

See https://honouringouranzacs.com.au/page/home.

Improved communications channels and more knowledge-sharing events are in the works for New Zealand’s Research Software Engineer (RSE) community.  At eResearch NZ 2019, Nooriyah Lohani, Research Communities Advisor with New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, hosted a brainstorming session for RSE community members to share ideas of ways to further engage this growing community.  A recap of that session is now available to read online.

Read more at:  https://www.nesi.org.nz/news/2019/03/next-steps-nz%E2%80%99s-research-software-engineer-rse-community.

Professor Kheifets and his colleagues have now found the answer to the question “How long does quantum tunnelling take?”

Find the answer here http://nci.org.au/research/confirming-incredible-quantum-phenomenon/.

Don’t forget that AeRO is helping spread the word on the latest eResearch job opportunities.  We post jobs immediately to https://twitter.com/AeRO_eResearch and also update on our website at http://aero.edu.au/eresearch-careers/.

This is a free service for the eResearch community – to advertise a position, simply email loretta@aero.edu.au.

Here’s a sample of current vacancies: Library Research Services Coordinator, Digital Capability Advisor, Bioinformatics Engagement Officer, Scientific Computing Specialist, HPC Linux Systems Administrator, Research Data Manager, Astronomy Data Science Project and Software Support, Data Governance and Policy Officer, Data Technologist, HPC Systems Administrator, Identity Software Developer, Fibre Construction Project Manager, Communications Networks Research Engineer, Research Systems Security Compliance Analyst, eResearch Analyst Positions.