Intersect News #68 May 2014

luke
2 May 2014

Strategic plan

The new mission of Intersect is to “realise research impact through eResearch”. See how we plan to do that in the next four years.

Download the plan here

Health and Life Sciences Award

A tour of the awarded RDSI facility late last year.

Intersect has been awarded the Hitachi Data System (HDS) Health and Life Sciences Innovation Award.

The HDS release states, “Intersect Australia, in particular, stood out with their Hitachi storage implementation as the foundation to their Research Data Storage Infrastructure node. Today, with the integration of HNAS, HCP, HUS and StrongBox appliances, Intersect Australia is improving the availability, accessibility and re-use of quality breast cancer samples, patient data, images and datasets, which aim to expand the scale and scope of the research that Australian scientists are seeking to address.  It is especially noteworthy that with HDS storage, Intersect Australia has realised a significant reduction in administration and overhead while simultaneously improving reliability and service continuity.  With this forward thinking strategy, Intersect Australia has prepared themselves to sustain high quality research while ensuring the most cost-effective use of resources “.

An award ceremony will occur in the near future. More

Infrastructure Status Update

RDSI

  • We have now approved 5.3 Petabytes of data for storage!
  • Total number of approved collections: 58
  • TBs ingested

: 520

NeCTAR Research Cloud

We are now evaluating initial responses to our RFQ for the Intersect node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud.
 The key objectives are to create a NeCTAR Research Cloud node that:

  • delivers all the required functionality for NeCTAR
  • can be scaled out to meet future demand
  • will interoperate with other NeCTAR RC nodes
  • allows for tight integration with existing research data storage and HPC, and
  • can be operated and managed cost-effectively.

Call for IP addresses

We are still looking for IPv4 address space. Any members who can help, please make contact.

Service Desk

Local configuration is now in progress and we expect to move into full production by the end of the month when our QA is complete.

For more on our Infrastructure programs see here

Cr8it starts

Intersect has begun work on the Cr8it application, an OwnCloud plug-in. Cr8it is a UWS initiative that aims to provide the general community of researchers with a simple and consistent way to manage, archive and advertise their research datasets. This application has been developed in-house by UWS and has also had some further development by Intersect with funding from the University of Newcastle. Cr8it is now receiving further feature development and quality assurance.

Intersect will implement the design, and undertake programming, testing, and documentation to ensure timely completion of each of the project deliverables.

Training

The following training courses will occur in the near future:

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

eResearch Australasia 2014 CfP

Practitioners, researchers and educators are invited to participate in eResearch Australasia 2014. Conference participants can opt to present workshops, presentations, point/counterpoint debates, birds of a feather sessions (BoF) or panels. This year’s conference theme is ‘Towards unified global research’.

eResearch Australasia 2014 CfP closes 6 June 2014

SkyMapper to become a national facility

ANU and CAASTRO have announced that ANU’s SkyMapper telescope will be offered as a national facility from 2014-2019, with data available to the entire Australian community.

SkyMapper is a new automated optical wide-field survey telescope, located at Siding Spring Observatory. Intersect is involved in several related projects including helping to build the All-Sky Virtual Observatory, in particular the Theoretical Astrophysical Observatory.

The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through the Australian Research Council. SkyMapper is owned and operated by ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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