News & Media

In her first engagement on being re-commissioned, the NSW Minister for Science and Medical Research, Hon. Jodi McKay MP has opened Intersect's new premises. "Can I say how pleased I am to be here with you as the Minister for Science and Research. I was sworn in again about an hour ago," said the Minister.

"The new premises we open today will enlarge Intersect's capacity to provide specialised ICT solutions for our research sector," she said. "The NSW Government has provided $2.8 million in funding to help establish this institute through the Science Leveraging Fund, which provides money for essential infrastructure that allows organisations such as Intersect to leverage important Commonwealth and philanthropic funds," the Minister pointed out.

"The work of Intersect is a prime example of the kind of clever thinking and effective use of emerging technologies that make NSW Australia's clever State," the Minister said.

The Education Infrastructure Fund (EIF) consultation process continues, and as part of this process, Intersect has prepared a paper on NSW research data storage infrastructure, based on feedback received from key players over the last month, (see here).

We encourage any interested parties to work through their university representatives to make their views. If you don't know who your campus representative is, please feel free to contact us at enquiries@intersect.org.au

One of NSW's high performance computers, the DELL cluster Barossa, is nearing the end of its useful life. It now costs a huge amount to run and its nodes are starting to fail. ac3 has informed Intersect that it will decommission Barossa on 31st October 2009. Our other high performance computer, McLaren, will continue to operate without change.

In replacement of Barossa, the Intersect consortium will be investing in NCI, the National Computational Infrastructure, where we will get a guaranteed number of CPU hours on their new peak facility.

As part of this process, Intersect will soon be running a resource allocation round. Please watch out for more HPC news here.

HPC users, if you have not received an email regarding this in the last week, your email address is probably out of date. Please contact hpc_support@intersect.org.au

Intersect has kicked off its next Innovation Project: the 'Genomic Data Project' is an opportunity to address the data management needs for the next-generation gene sequencing community. Genomic projects underpin almost all aspects of modern biology. This includes modern molecular biology, biodiversity studies, and medical research including but not limited to research into cancer, vaccines, antibiotics and drug development.

Currently, gene sequencing technology is being rolled out simultaneously in multiple institutions via an active community of researchers who have a strong interest in working collaboratively. The project will support a wide user base including researchers at the University of New South Wales, Southern Cross University and the Australian National University. The Ramaciotti Centre for Gene Function Analysis (located at UNSW) is run and used by a consortium of UNSW, the University of Sydney, Newcastle University, Macquarie University, Southern Cross University as well as the Garvan, Victor Chang and Millennium medical research institutes. Work formally begins on the project in October, completing in early 2010.

Intersect is interested in working with others who may be in a similar situation to avoid duplication of effort. If you are using similar technology, are interested in being involved in, or using the outcomes of the project, please contact Chris Mendes at chris.mendes@intersect.org.au.

The University of New England (UNE) voted at last week's council meeting to join Intersect. UNE will become a subscribing member of Intersect for three years.

UNE's A/g PVCR, Prof Ray Cooksey says, "UNE, the first regional Australian university, is very keen to move forward and start working in collaboration with Intersect to pursue mutually advantageous strategic priorities. UNE is particularly interested in working with Intersect to evolve projects that address the needs of rural and regional researchers in a larger collaborative context".

"This is significant because UNE is the first university to sign since the foundation members started Intersect last year", says Intersect CEO Ian Gibson, "we welcome UNE as our seventh university member and look forward to working together in the coming years".

"Intersect is working to influence the national framework for research infrastructure, and in particular to secure Education Infrastructure Funding for the State. The Federal budget allocated an additional $312M over four years for Platforms for Collaboration, as part of its broader science and research investment program. Intersect currently has seven staff funded through various PfC programs. We expect this to increase substantially", he said.

Universities need to provide their views on the Federal Government's research and investment program, and the Super Science data storage initiative in particular, by October 2009.

"Intersect can bring these needs together, and ensure that NSW universities requirements are met. UNE's membership strengthens the NSW case and helps us represent research needs across the NSW university sector" said Gibson.

Intersect's first Graduate Software Engineer starts work today. Howey Fu graduated last year with  a Bachelor of Software Engineering (First Class Hons) and Commerce-Finance from the University of NSW. Howey will join the Innovation Projects Team and begin work on the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank project immediately.

This is the first appointment in an ongoing strategy intended to address critical eResearch skills shortages by providing training, professional development and career opportunities.

Intersect is planning to recruit another 2 - 3 graduates.

The Linkage Infrastructure Equipment Facilities (LIEF) application for a distributed research data store for NSW has been submitted to the Australian Research Council. LE100100100 finally ran to 173 pages. The application makes a strong case with solid contributions from all Intersect members plus the University of Western Sydney (UWS), and an impressive lineup of Chief Investigators (CIs). Many thanks go to Prof Marc Wilkins from UNSW, who as Lead CI shouldered the intellectual burden of the application.

Intersect has added another project to its production cycle. Healthy.me is a communication tool operating in the health sector and is headed up by Professor Enrico Coiera, Director of Centre for Health Informatics at the University of UNSW.

Members will recall that the Intersect consortium was awarded an ARC LIEF grant in 2009 for a high performance computing cluster to replace one of the aging super computers at ac3. The consortium faced two options:, (1) the renewal of local HPC infrastructure through the purchase of a new cluster system, and (2) the acquisition of services from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) on its National Facility. Intersect commissioned an independent assessment of the options and that report has been circulated to the grant’s CIs, the relevant DVCRs and the Intersect Board. The consultants recommended that the consortium invest in NCI, stating, “the NCI proposal will most likely deliver the best outcomes for delivery of high performance computing services to the NSW Universities and research teams”. All parties have since adopted the recommendation. Moreover all universities have reaffirmed their commitment to the $390K promised in the original application and this, together with the $500K granted by the ARC, provides $890K for the renewal of HPC facilities.  We will keep you updated regarding further developments.

Intersect has run a round of resource allocation for research time on the two NSW super computer clusters. Applications closed in late March, and Campus Coordinators met on April 24 and May 1 to finalise the allocations. The super computer ‘Barossa’ was oversubscribed by 20 per cent and ‘McLaren’ by 60 per cent. This is further confirmation that NSW universities' access to appropriate capacity is limited.

Staff from Intersect and ANDS are collaborating on projects including developing guidelines for harvesting repositories towards the Registry of Collections. Staff from both agencies met on April 30 to discuss NeAT bids, joint approaches to those researchers, and to clarify areas of responsibility. ANDS business analyst Katie Blake has been based at Intersect since January.

This project is building a web interface and tools to enable authorised researchers to search, filter and browse the ASRB database; link metadata from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images; and download MRI, genetic and clinical information. Read more...

Chris Mendes joined Intersect in mid March as Director of Engineering to head up the Projects Division. Chris has over 15 years experience managing commercial technology development, most recently as General Manager of a research and development division at CiSRA, Canon's Research and Development centre in Australia.

DataMINX is a NeAT supported project aiming to provide eResearch services and reources for the NCRIS 5.3 characterisation community of users of microscopy, neutron and x-ray instruments for probing molecular and materials structure. Read more...