Intersect News #58 July 2013

luke
3 Jul 2013

Research Data Storage update

The Intersect Storage Allocation Committee has now been meeting since April 2013. We have 21 collections approved for ingestion with 14 currently in assessment and approximately 10 additional collections being approved per month.

The technical teams are working with data custodians of the approved collections on data migration plans and access requirements before moving them onto the RDSI. Meanwhile Intersect’s eResearch Analysts continue to work with the universities on their internal processes and on identifying collections.

Applications are sent to the Storage Allocation Committee monthly, the cut off date for each month is the last working day of the month.

The rollout of the RDSI infrastructure for the Intersect node is on track for August this year.

NCI’s Raijin is go

In keeping with the environmental research it supports, NCI’s new peak facility is named ‘Raijin’ after the Japanese God of lightning, thunder and storms. Raijin, God of Thunder, LACMA by Kaigyokusai (Masatsugu).

The National Computational Infrastructure has announced that the new Fujitsu Primergy supercomputer is in full production service. Reaching 98% efficiency in the first days of service, the facility is now available to those with allocations under Intersect’s HPC scheme. On its first day ARC Future Fellow, UNSW’s Associate Professor Evatt Hawkes, was using over half the system to answer fundamental questions on combustion in next generation engines and combustion of new fuels.

NCI Director Professor Lindsay Botten said “NCI is supplying researchers with both the infrastructure and world class expertise required to push the boundaries of innovative research in key disciplines that are of national importance to Australia – amongst these are climate and earth systems science.”

In the June 2013 TOP500 list of best supercomputers, Raijin sits at number one in Australia, and number 27 in the world. More on Raijin here.

Vayu will continue to be available for the near future. Raijin users coming from Vayu may notice there are no Matlab licences available on Raijin. Intersect is working with NCI to determine if and how to provide Matlab to Intersect HPC users.

UTS Metadata Stores Program (MS22)

The aim of this project is to establish a university-wide metadata store that will integrate with existing enterprise research information systems.  It will enable UTS to administer and plan research data storage and other infrastructure.

The metadata store will be used to make research data available for re-use both within UTS and to the wider community via data harvest and discovery services such as Research Data Australia. Intersect will perform the analysis, design, building and testing of the discrete units of development.

The metadata store will support the following activities:

  • Manual registration of datasets by researchers and administrative staff
  • Automated registration of datasets as collected by data capture activities
  • Maintenance of metadata
  • Feeds of metadata records made available to Research Data Australia
  • Search and discovery of data collections by UTS researchers and administrative staff.

More information at http://www.intersect.org.au/MS22

This project is supported by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). ANDS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy Program and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative.

Strategic Research Priorities released

The Chief Scientist and the Australian Research Committee (ARCom) have released their Strategic Research Priorities, see www.innovation.gov.au/StrategicResearchPriorities

The National Research Priorities have been discontinued and associated reporting requirements will be phased out by 30 June 2014.

The strategic research priorities will drive investment in areas including the future of research infrastructure funding, which will be more closely aligned with the identified priorities than in the past.

Training

The following training is occurring in the near future:

For more information, see http://www.intersect.org.au/training

NeCTAR project extends to 2014

A variation to the NeCTAR Funding Agreement has been executed with the Department of Innovation to extend the NeCTAR Project by 12 months to 31st December 2014.

NeCTAR sub-projects now have the opportunity to re-structure their schedules. Longer lead times provide greater opportunity for:

  • engagement and uptake by researchers and
  • mitigation of technical risks.

For more, contact NeCTAR on (03) 9034-1277 or admin@nectar.org.au

New staff

Darren Wood has joined our Infrastructure team as Storage Infrastructure Specialist working on the RDSI project.

Andrew Morton is working with us in a casual business analyst capacity.

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