Nov/Dec 2016 national eResearch newsletter
Welcome to the AeRO eResearch Newsletter
This combined November/December edition, we welcome to the Newsletter another 90+ subscribers, many from the Conference mailing list. We keep the 2 mailing lists separate, as we are careful to ensure they are only used for the purpose for which subscribers joined. This is a bumper edition of this Newsletter, so I hope no-one is overwhelmed by it! We apologise to those who went to the trouble of supplying graphics, but we’ve had to defer that new format for now.
This is the last edition for 2016, so I join with Retta Davis and Markus Buchhorn at AeRO in wishing you all a very peaceful and refreshing Christmas break!
Alex Reid, Newsletter Editor.
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CONTENTS
International Open Repositories Conference Submissions Close 30-Nov
Virtual Lab Workshop 29-30 Nov & Developer Roundtable 1st Dec
Open Call for Those Keen on Library Carpentry Funding
QCIF Seeks a New CEO
NSW Government Gazette Digitised
ANDS + NeCTAR + RDS Joint Services for Researchers
Global Mapping of Bioinformatics Training in Australia
Research Bazaar Brisbane 7-Feb-17 – Expression of Interest & Involvement
The University of Sydney’s Artemis HPC Capacity Tripled
NCI Welcomes 40% Boost in Computational Capacity from January 2017
CSIRO Seeks New Petaflop Computer
Jo Morris Joins QCIF as National eResearch Help Desk Manager
ReDBox Version 1.9 Released
New Features for CloudStor FileSender: End-to-End Encryption and More
eRSA’s Innovation Symposium: Disruption
What’s Next for the eResearch IT Infrastructure Ecosystem?
eResearch Australasia Conference Proceedings
Sync&Share Mode Vital for Cloud Storage Uptake
Cancer Researchers Combine and Analyse Quality Data with AURIN
Record Hot Year May be the New Normal by 2025
NCI 2015-16 Annual Report Published
CloudStor Helps the Long Tail of Researchers at CQU
Data Intensive Workshops Held at NCI
Report of Survey on Open Research Data
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International Open Repositories Conference Submissions Close 30-Nov
The final deadline for submitting proposals for the Twelfth International Conference on Open Repositories (@OR2017aus and #OR2017) has been extended until Wednesday, November 30, 2016.
The theme this year is “Open : Innovation | Knowledge | Repositories.” You may review the call for proposals here: http://or2017.net/call-for-proposals/
Submit your proposal here: https://www.conftool.net/or2017/ by November 30, 2016.
Virtual Lab Workshop 29-30 Nov & Developer Roundtable 1st Dec
Involved in building and operating Virtual Laboratories and associated research software infrastructure? You are invited to two workshops to share experiences and coordinate activity:
Virtual Lab Workshop 29-30 Nov: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nectar-virtual-laboratory-research-software-infrastructure-workshop-tickets-28877175409
Cloud Software Developer Roundtable 1 Dec: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cloud-software-developer-roundtable-tickets-29206003944
Open Call for Those Keen on Library Carpentry Funding
The Library Carpentry suite of lessons (https://librarycarpentry.github.io/), which Australians had a hand in developing, won the British Library Labs’s Teaching and Learning Award (http://labs.bl.uk/) on 7 November.
The Library Carpentry community plans to spend the award’s £500 prize money to support a Library Carpentry workshop anywhere in the world next year, including Australia.
If your institution needs financial support to run a Library Carpentry workshop or individual librarian training, see the Library Carpentry blog for details of how to apply: http://librarycarpentry.github.io/workshop-call/. The deadline for applications is 16-Dec-16. Read more: https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2016/11/open-call-those-keen-library-carpentry-funding
QCIF seeks a new CEO
QCIF’s Board has accepted Rob Cook’s request to step down as CEO of QCIF after six years in the job and has initiated an executive search for a replacement. Rob has agreed to continue to guide QCIF until the new CEO is appointed. View the job ad: https://www.seek.com.au/job/32136633. Read more at http://eepurl.com/cmZK2P
NSW Government Gazette Digitised
The National Library of Australia, Trove and the State Library of NSW have joined forces to digitise one million pages of the historic New South Wales Government Gazette.
The Gazettes feature all the news that was fit to be told of our early colonial days, dating from 1832 and then continuing up to 2001 when they began to be published electronically. The Gazettes are now freely available in Trove for close-reading or via the Trove API for machine analysis.
Read all about it in this blog by Trove’s Cathie Oats:
https://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove/2016/11/01/nsw-government-gazette
ANDS + NeCTAR + RDS Joint Services for Researchers
Australian researchers will benefit from over $5m of new investments through a joint partnership between three eResearch providers – the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (Nectar) and Research Data Services (RDS).
The funds will develop services for 10 national communities researching fields including climate, medical, terrestrial and marine environments, culture and genomics.
All three organisations are federally funded though the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
Global Mapping of Bioinformatics Training in Australia
EMBL-ABR people and associates recently mapped out the bioinformatics training landscape for Australia, identifying needs in data management and statistics. They combined survey responses from Australian life science researchers and bioinformaticians, feedback from computational biology conferences in Europe and the USA, and data from courses advertised across Australia. These results were presented at the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (AB3ACBS) Conference in November. Given the geographic separation of research communities and limited research funding, some creative solutions and much collaboration will be required to deliver these successfully. See poster on this at https://f1000research.com/posters/5-2648.
Research Bazaar Brisbane 7-Feb-17 – Expression of Interest & Involvement
Research Bazaar is essentially a three day conference around research in institutes and universities around Queensland with an audience of researchers from all career stages (Masters, PhD, Post-Docs, ECRs). We spend the first day with talks, stalls and collaborative activities, followed by two days upskilling in programming and IT knowledge, open data and good research practices. Last year 250 students came from many disciplines such as Biology, Ecology, Chemistry, Engineering, Psychology, Humanities and Library.
We have released an expression of interest for both attendance and volunteers, as well as stalls and sponsorship, here: https://2017.resbaz.com/brisbane.
The University of Sydney’s Artemis HPC Capacity Tripled
Artemis, the University of Sydney’s flagship high-performance computer, has near tripled in capacity following a significant upgrade delivered in October.
Following the upgrade, Artemis now has a compute capacity of 4,264 cores including three high memory nodes containing 64 cores and 6TB of memory each.
Artemis was launched in 2015 to support high-quality research as part of the University’s investment in research capability, particularly in the area of informatics.
You can find out more about Artemis at http://sydney.edu.au/research_support/hpc/.
NCI Welcomes 40% Boost in Computational Capacity from January 2017
The National Computational Infrastructure, NCI, has announced that XENON Systems has been awarded the contract to supply a Lenovo NeXtScale system as an extension of Raijin, NCI’s current peak facility, which was commissioned in 2013. As researchers’ requirements for access to high-performance compute (HPC) capability continue to grow unabated, the new Lenovo system will help NCI to meet this demand by providing a 40% increase in capacity. Read more here: http://nci.org.au/2016/11/10/nci-welcomes-40-boost-computational-capacity-january-2017/.
CSIRO Seeks New Petaflop Computer
CSIRO has commenced the search for the next generation of computer to replace their current Bragg accelerator cluster. Bragg’s replacement is expected to be capable of ‘petaflop’ speeds, significantly exceeding the existing computer’s performance.
The cluster will power a new generation of ground-breaking scientific research, including data analysis, modelling, and simulation in a variety of science domains, such as biophysics, material science, molecular modelling, marine science, geochemical modelling, computational fluid dynamics, and more recently, artificial intelligence and data analytics using deep learning.
The tender can be seen at AusTender (http://www.tenders.gov.au/ Tender: CSIRORFT2016020) and will close on Monday 19-Dec-16.
Jo Morris Joins QCIF as National eResearch Help Desk Manager
Jo Morris of Griffith University has taken over from Nick Golovachenko as National User Support Manager on the National eResearch Help Desk.
The National eResearch Help Desk (https://support.ehelp.edu.au/) provides user support for the Nectar Research Cloud, RDS data storage, Virtual Laboratories and other services.
In her new role, Jo is responsible for the efficient and effective operation of the Help Desk and coordinating a geographically distributed team of user support agents from multiple organisations. Read more: http://eepurl.com/cmZK2P.
ReDBox Version 1.9 Released
QCIF is pleased to announce the release of version 1.9 of the ReDBox metadata management platform.
This release will support ORCIDs as researcher identifiers and will be compliant with the Australian National Data Service’s RIF-CS schema, version 1.6. Read more: http://eepurl.com/cmZK2P
New Features for CloudStor FileSender: End-to-End Encryption and Morec
AARNet has upgraded the CloudStor backend and improved the CloudStor FileSender functionality, making sharing files and collaboration easier for researchers. Improvements include a more reliable and robust interface, and the addition of finer grained controls, allowing you to decide who receives what notification emails (if any at all). There’s also much more detail in reporting and an audit log is now available to senders. AARNet is also excited about full end-to-end encryption for FileSender, assuring nobody except you and your recipient ever see the plaintext file. AARNet welcomes your feedback.
See http://news.aarnet.edu.au/new-features-for-cloudstor-filesender-end-to-end-encryption-and-more/.
eRSA’s Innovation Symposium: Disruption
In November, eRSA ran its inaugural Innovation Symposium with the theme ‘Disruption’, as a part of its partnership with Open State. This Symposium tackled concepts like big data, data analytics, digital disruption, and platform strategies with presenters from Dell, Amazon, Data to Decision CRC and eRSA.
Minister Kyam Maher, MLC, launched the South Australian Research and Innovation Platform at the Symposium, which will enable new cutting edge IT services for South Australia’s innovation precincts.
Read more here: https://www.ersa.edu.au/innovation-symposium-disruption/.
What’s Next for the eResearch IT Infrastructure Ecosystem?
While there is some uncertainty around how the eResearch environment will look going forward, there is no uncertainty about how critical national ICT infrastructure supporting research is.
This infrastructure consists of entities such as AARNet, AAF, ANDS, NeCTAR and RDS working together to provide services that support the eResearch sector, underpin research impact and excellence, and drive economic, environmental, health and social benefits for Australia.
AARNet interviewed Ian Duncan, RDS Director, about the role RDS plays and some of the new projects in the pipeline involving other infrastructure partners, including AARNet.
Watch the short (3:30 minute) video at http://news.aarnet.edu.au/whats-next-for-the-eresearch-it-infrastructure-ecosystem/.
eResearch Australasia Conference Proceedings
After a tremendously successful eResearch conference in Melbourne in October, you can continue to enjoy the conference via the portal of research outputs powered by figshare at https://eresearch.figshare.com/. If you presented at the conference and would like to see your slides or poster in the conference portal then upload to figshare and tag it ‘eresearch2016’. If you have any questions contact info@figshare.com.
Sync&Share Mode Vital for Cloud Storage Uptake
At the Digital Infrastructures for Research Conference in Poland recently, AARNet’s eResearch leader Guido Aben talked about the potential for CloudStor to function as the building block for the data movement core of the proposed Australian Research Data System – the “data pump”, capable of ingesting as well as egressing data through regular file transfers, as well as sync&share. This sync&share capability is absolutely vital because pilots have revealed orders of magnitude difference in end user uptake between cloud storage presented to researchers through “legacy tooling” and the same storage presented through a sync&share frontend.
Cancer Researchers Combine and Analyse Quality Data with AURIN
The AURIN Workbench (https://aurin.org.au/workbench/) is a unique eResearch resource making sense of the masses of data that researchers are now dealing with. Researchers at Peter MacCallum (https://www.petermac.org/research) were able to draw on detailed data from a wide range of sources and combine it with their own lung cancer data to ascertain why an increasing number of patients – about a third of them women – were being diagnosed with lung cancer when none of them had smoked and their families had no history of cancer. Read the full article at https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/making-big-data-deliver.amp.
Record Hot Year May be the New Normal by 2025
The hottest year on record globally in 2015 could be an average year by 2025 and beyond if carbon emissions continue to rise at the same rate, new research has found. Lead author Dr Sophie Lewis said human activities had already locked in this new normal for future temperatures, but immediate climate action could prevent record extreme seasons year after year. Using the NCI supercomputer at ANU to run climate models, the researchers explored when new normal states would appear under the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s four emissions pathways. Read more here: http://nci.org.au/research/record-hot-year-may-new-normal-2025/.
NCI 2015-16 Annual Report Published
The National Computational Infrastructure’s Annual Report for 2015-16 has now been published. It provides an overview of NCI’s activity during that period, including the advancements in NCI’s services and infrastructure. It highlights the great research being conducted by scientists from each of NCI’s partner institutions. Major highlights of the year include the addition of dedicated Graphics Processing Unit nodes to NCI’s supercomputer Raijin, and the signing of an agreement placing NCI as the regional hub for the Southeast Asian satellite observations coming the European Commission’s Copernicus program. You can read the entire document here: http://e-doc.me/NCI_AR_2016/.
CloudStor Helps the Long Tail of Researchers at CQU
The uptake of the AARNet CloudStor file sender and storage service is rapidly gaining momentum in the higher education community, accelerating past 28,500 during November. At Central Queensland University (CQU), for example, the service is working well for a wide range of users: students, staff and the long tail of researchers. Watch the short video interview (2:12 min) to hear what Jason Bell, CQU Senior Research Technologies Officer, says about CQU’s CloudStor experience and why it is proving to be a popular file sender and storage option for the University.
See http://news.aarnet.edu.au/cloudstor-helps-the-long-tail-of-researchers-at-cqu/.
Data Intensive Workshops Held at NCI
NCI held two 2-day data workshops in early November, providing the user community with training in how best to access and make use of NCI’s large environmental data collections. Catering to both beginner and advanced users, researchers and data managers from all over Australia participated in the workshops.
The workshops introduced the diverse collections stored at NCI, as well as methods to access and work with them and common tools and services such as the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. NCI hopes to hold similar workshops in 2017. Learn more about the data workshops and data collections at: http://nci.org.au/research-news/events/data-intensive-workshop/.
Report of Survey on Open Research Data
To celebrate Open Access Week, figshare released the survey results of 2,000 researchers in a report that assesses the global landscape around open data and sharing practices. One of the key findings was 80% of researchers value data citation as much as, or more than, article citation. The report is a combination of survey results and guest contributions, including David Groenewegen at Monash University. It highlights the extent of awareness around open data, the incentives around its use, and perspectives researchers have about making their own research data open. The report is available to download at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4036398.v1.
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Note: This Newsletter is based on contributions provided by members of the eResearch community, and also draws on the many news articles and newsletters published across our sector. The Newsletter is normally published monthly, on about the 16th of each month, but the next one will be issued at the start of February 2017. Please send any contributions (no more than 100 words, plus a link) or pointers to any other relevant articles or newsletters to editor@aero.edu.au. Archives of these Newsletters are held at http://aero.edu.au/newsletters/.
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