July 2018 national eResearch newsletter

Connecting academics and industry professionals working in EcoSciences, the EcoScience Pathways forum will provide an opportunity to learn more about existing digital infrastructure, contemporary data and management practices for environmental science.

This forum is an opportunity for the EcoScience community to have their say on better integration of digital technologies in courses and training programs, and how the community can collaborate to advance research practices into management decisions.

Visit our Registration Page for more info:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/perth-ecoscience-pathways-forum-tickets-45962773894.

Once the domain of enterprise and corporations, containers have emerged as a viable option for many workflows in the HPC space.  Over the past year, Pawsey staff have been investigating and experimenting with different container solutions.

In this seminar we’ll discuss some preliminary findings, lessons learned, benchmarks, and a roadmap for how we envision containers being used at Pawsey.  We’ll also show some live demos of containers in action.

Join us on July 26, 9.30am (AWST) by registering here:  https://www.pawsey.org.au/event/pawsey-online-training-overview-of-containers-in-hpc/.

On Thursday 26 July, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is offering year 10 students the opportunity to discover the awe-inspiring nature of science, and how to become one of the experts that are accelerating innovation in Australia.  In an endeavour to create excitement about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics for students, they will hear the experiences of researchers, industry representatives, interns and Pawsey experts.

A quick tour of the Centre will follow, with the opportunity to see, up close and personal, Magnus, Pawsey’s flagship supercomputing system and one of the largest public research supercomputers in the southern hemisphere.

Click here for registrations and more information:  https://www.pawsey.org.au/event/pawsey-careers-night/.

The next Pawsey Friday – an opportunity for the community to meet researchers – 27 July, from 3pm at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.

Associate Professor Paolo Raiteri and Professor Julian Gale, both from Curtin University, will present on how their team are working to uncover the secrets of the formation of crystals from ions in water processes.

During this session, Gale and Raiteri will also demonstrate how computer simulation, based on the dynamics of ions in solution, has been used to provide both valuable insights and quantitative data for such processes.

Register here:  https://www.pawsey.org.au/event/pawsey-friday-featuring-prof-julian-gale-and-paolo-raiteri/.

The next monthly Tech Talk (virtually and at locations around Australia) will be held at 15:00-16:00 AEST on Friday, 3-Aug-18.  The topic will be:  Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT’s promise to reshape industries and bring immense value to our lives.  We have seen applications in smart home, wearables, smart city, smart farming, smart supply chain, etc.  This event will feature talks on either IoT platforms or applications.

More information and how to enrol can be seen at https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/

and https://techtalkau-internetofthings.eventbrite.com.au.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre will be opening its doors on Saturday 11 August for a fun, family-friendly day, as part of National Science Week.

The Open Day is a great opportunity to meet with Pawsey experts and discover what goes on behind the scenes of BIG SCIENCE in Australia.

This event will bring together a range of fun activities for researchers, industry representatives, students and the general public to learn all about supercomputers, their history, the benefits they can bring to society and the outcomes that Pawsey systems are delivering to help Australian growth and advancement.

More information and registration:  https://www.pawsey.org.au/event/2018-pawsey-open-day/.

When is a poster more than a poster?  When it’s an ePoster!

ePosters are the future of conference poster sessions, and use a series of high-res monitors to display multimedia format posters.

Using enhanced visualisation, ePosters enable presenters to convey information in ways far beyond the capability of traditional printed posters.

Submissions for ePosters and traditional posters for eResAU will close 24 August https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/abstract-submission/.

Limited spots available!

Hosted by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, the second annual HPCAIAC Perth Conference will bring industry luminaries and leading subject matter experts together from all over the world to explore major and emerging domains and share in-depth insights on AI, Data Sciences, HPC, Deep/Machine Learning, Visualization and more.

The conference, held on August 28 – 29, is still open for presentation submissions for a wide range of expertise, topics, levels and considerations – from architectures, applications and usage to fundamentals, new models, emerging technology and latest advances along with hot topic and specific interest areas.

For registrations and submissions, visit http://hpcadvisorycouncil.com/events/2018/australia-conference/register.php.

Register to attend the National Forum: ORCID Future Directions on 6-Sep at ANU (https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/national-forum-orcid-future-directions-tickets-47197141922).  The event will provide an opportunity to understand how ORCID can fit into your key strategic objectives and the national vision for ORCID in Australia.

Attendees will get the chance to hear from ORCID’s Director of Partnerships, Josh Brown (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8689-4935), on the future of ORCID globally.  The event will facilitate a national community of practice and provide an opportunity for key stakeholders to come together.

Visit the webpage for more information https://aaf.edu.au/news/events.html.

National Imaging Facility led a collaborative project to enhance the quality, durability and reliability of data from NIF infrastructure.  Supported by ARDC (then ANDS and RDS) along with four NIF nodes, the Trusted Data Repository (TDR) project established an agreed set of requirements to obtain high-quality data and a platform-agnostic list of requirements that a trusted data repository service must satisfy.  Together, these will enable access to data, including metadata documenting both data quality and its provenance, for at least 10 years.

Read more about key project outcomes and benefits to the research community via: http://anif.org.au/research_project/trusted-data-repository/.

Federation University Australia’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) recently completed work contributing to the development of the Healthy Estuaries portal for Northern Agricultural Catchments Council (NACC) in Western Australia.  The portal offers access to community monitoring information for the Hill and Moore river estuaries, as well as additional, complementary information on several other sites.  The portal has been designed to enhance the user experience, offering an easily accessible, practical and informative way in.  A key feature is the enabling of data sharing from citizen scientists involved in estuary monitoring events.

Healthy Estuaries WA website: www.healthyestuaries.com.au

See full story here: http://www.cerdi.edu.au/cb_pages/news/CeRDINewsletterAutumn2018.php#8.

Near Geraldton, Western Australia, lies the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of Australia’s leading radio telescopes.  As an internationally accessible telescope, collaboration is integral to the success of the MWA.  To ensure collaboration is seamless and secure, the MWA has connected to eduGAIN.

Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, MWA Director, said, “the eduGAIN connection is a vital service for an international collaboration like the MWA making it simple for our team of global researchers to access data from the telescope”.

Organisations can connect to eduGAIN through the Australian Access Federation (AAF). Learn more at https://aaf.edu.au/edugain/.

AARNet has joined an initiative supported by the Internet Society that aims to improve the security and resilience of the global routing system.  Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats including route hijacking, route leaks, and IP address spoofing.  AARNet joins other members including a further ten research and education networks in Europe, the US and China, as well as numerous commercial providers.

Read more at: https://news.aarnet.edu.au/aarnet-joins-initiative-to-improve-routing-security/.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre welcomes Mark Stickells, who started his new role as Director this week.

Mark has had 10 years leading UWA’s Innovation and Industry Engagement, and 20 years in joint ventures, R&D and collaborative research programs.  This government, industry, research and technology experience will bring synergy to Pawsey, and will help lead this Centre into a new era.  Following the recent funding announcement (https://www.pawsey.org.au/2018/04/new-funding-to-accelerate-science-and-innovation/), Mark will play a key role in shaping the future of Australia’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) and in bringing a new range of users to the facility from across industry sectors.

Read more at https://www.pawsey.org.au/2018/05/pawsey-announces-the-appointment-of-a-new-director/.

At the University of Melbourne’s Networked Society Institute (NSI), a small team of researchers has spent three years focusing on health and medical applications of VR technology.  NSI takes advantage of a dedicated gigabit connection to the AARNet network for developing and testing their VR technologies and carrying out user trials.

Read more at:  https://news.aarnet.edu.au/vr-therapy-research-transforming-perspectives-and-improving-lives/.

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.

Current vacancies include:  a Software Engineer, a Medical Research Data Scientist, a Chief Information Officer (CIO), a Software Developer, a Bioinformatics Support Specialist, a Specialist Scientific Programmer, a Digital Humanities Professor, a Data Analytics Web Developer, a Research DevOps, Cloud Computing and HPC experts, a User Experience Designer, a Senior Cloud Services Product Manager, and an ORCiD Membership Specialist.