Intersect News #75 October 2014

luke
1 Oct 2014

Australian Catholic University joins Intersect

The Australian Catholic University has joined Intersect, becoming our twelfth university member.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research of the Australian Catholic University Professor Wayne McKenna said “With ACU’s recent strong investment in research, and the establishment of our new research institutes, ACU is delighted to become a full member of Intersect”.

Intersect CEO Ian Gibson welcomed the new member saying, “Intersect is pleased to be able to support ACU in its research endeavours”.

Intersect now represents twelve universities, with sixteen members in total.

ARMS conference: If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research.

Collaboration and good will: Prof Warwick Anderson AM, CEO of the NHMRC and Prof Aidan Byrne, CEO of the ARC face research managers in the Q & A session. Photo: richard@eventphotography.com | www.eventphotography.com

A big crowd of more than 520 delegates attended the Australian Research Management Society conference in Canberra in mid September.

The ARMS 2014 conference themes were Influence; Impact; Change; Translation; Data; and Health. Highlights included an address by Prof Brian Schmidt AC FAA FRS, Nobel Laureate, on understanding the idiosyncrasies of researchers, Dr Mark Hochman’s review of international practice around impact and a Q & A session with the Prof Warwick Anderson AM, CEO of the NHMRC and Prof Aidan Byrne, CEO of the ARC. Notable were the wake-up-call addresses from Professor Ian Chubb, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Thomas Barlow and Professor Mike Brooks all pointing to the risks and challenges for Australia in the increasingly competitive world of research.

Intersect is pleased to have been a Bronze Sponsor of ARMS 2014.

portal to the presentations at ARMS 2014 will be set up shortly. Watch this space.

Architecture Review for CSIRO complete

One of the 36 identical 12-metre dishes that make up the ASKAP telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Mid West region of WA. Image: CSIRO.

CSIRO recently engaged Intersect to perform an independent architecture review of the CSIRO Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Science Data Archive (CASDA). The CASDA system will be the principal data archive for the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.  The purpose of the review was to determine if the design for the CASDA system proposed by the CSIRO was capable of managing the substantial data volumes that are going to be generated by the ASKAP telescope.  In late August Intersect reported to the CSIRO team the results and recommendations of the review.

Merit-based High Performance Computing for 2015

Do you want to expand your computational power? Do you work with big or complex data? High Performance Computing (HPC) could help you increase your research output.

Intersect is pleased to announce the 2015 Intersect Resource Allocation Round (RAR) for HPC. The Resource Allocation Round is a merit-based system by which researchers can gain fully-subsidised access to Time, Intersect’s computing facilities. In 2015 there are over 30 Million SUs of compute time available to eligible staff researchers and their PhD students.

Key dates:

1 October 2014 – Applications Open

31 October 2014 – Applications Close

Last week of 2014 – Award Notifications

For more information on the 2015 application process see time.intersect.org.au/merit-allocation

Information on Time by Intersect — including information on HPC and system specifications — is available at time.intersect.org.au

Infrastructure Progress Report

Intersect has safely launched one petabyte of research data into Space

On September 16 we hit a historic Space milestone – Intersect has safely launched one petabyte of research data into Space.

Shane Youl, Intersect’s IT Manager said, “This is a fantastic result for Intersect and the research community we support. The Intersect Team has worked closely with data collection owners to expedite this movement of 1PB of research data and I congratulate all parties on achieving this important milestone. There is over 5PB of collection data spread across more than 60 collections which is already approved for storage, so there is still more to do, but this is a great start to creating a facility which will have a significant research impact in NSW and beyond”, he said.

Data Story: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

Photo: Jeremy Hammond

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) preserves recordings of hundreds of endangered languages from the Asia-Pacific region. With 25Tbs (including local backup) now stored on Intersect’s research data facility, PARADISEC is an exemplar for building secure infrastructure that enables citable, sharable and reusable data.

PARADISEC’s motivation is to create an enduring digital record for the languages of Australia’s region and to preserve them for the future use. Researchers use PARADISEC’s online catalogue to facilitate access to the materials for other researchers, indigenous community members, or anyone who has an interest in endangered cultures.

The collection hosts more than 70,000 items of data on over 600 languages. Most of the data has been collected by researchers as part of their fieldwork over the past 60 years. Many of these recordings are unique, unrepeatable and represent the only known documentation of particular communities from the Asia-Pacific region. It is highly significant for researchers in linguistic typology, comparative linguistics, anthropology, musicology and ethnomusicology. The collection is also important to cross-disciplinary researchers interested in the knowledge embedded in the recordings, for example those researching biodiversity, indigenous technical knowledge and the history of the region.

The quality and significance of this collection has been recognised by inscription in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for Australia.

PARADISEC has been funded by the Universities of SydneyMelbourne, New EnglandANU, the Australian Research Council and Grangenet since its establishment in 2003.

Training

The following sessions are scheduled to take place in the near future:

  • 3 October 2014: Excel Fu: Ask Me Anything: Show and Tell.  Register at http://bit.ly/1vw3sm6
  • 7 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at Sydney University. Register at http://bit.ly/1tg0NrW
  • 10 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at SCU Lismore. Register at http://bit.ly/10l6tKy
  • 15 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at UWS (Hawkesbury campus). Register at http://bit.ly/1vtxEMH
  • 17 October 2014: Excel Fu: Ask Me Anything: Show and Tell.  Register at http://bit.ly/1sMF40E
  • 21 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at UWS (Bankstown campus). Register at http://bit.ly/1wWLVCF
  • 21 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at University of Sydney (ANZAC Research Institute, Concord) Register at http://bit.ly/1tg1gdW
  • 28 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at UNSW. Register at UNSW.
  • 30 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at University of Sydney (Kolling Institute, Royal North Shore Hospital) Register at http://bit.ly/YRe4Pp
  • 31 October 2014: Excel for Researchers at UNSW. Register at UNSW.
  • 3 November 2014: Cleaning and Exploring your data with Open Refine at UNSW. Register at UNSW.
  • 3 November 2014: Data Visualisation with Google Fusion Tables at UNSW. Register at UNSW.
  • 6 November 2014: Excel for Researchers at CSU (Bathurst campus). Register at http://bit.ly/1CG54vWu
  • 7 November 2014: Excel for Researchers at CSU (Orange campus). Register at http://bit.ly/1xA4dg6

Bioinformatics Training

Bioplatforms Australia and Intersect Australia, with the support of the NSW Office of Health and Medical Research, would like to announce two hands-on Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workshops to be held in Sydney in November and December.

The Introduction to NGS Data Analysis is a three-day bioinformatics workshop that introduces NGS data analysis to ACT and NSW based health and medical researchers.  The workshop is delivered by experienced bioinformaticians and provides hands-on computational experience in common analytical approaches for ChIP-Seq, RNA-Seq data and de novo genome assembly.

10-12th November 2014

Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney

and

2-4th December 2014

EMC Building, Macquarie University

For more information and to register please visit www.bioplatforms.com.au/training.

eResearch Australasia 2014 imminent

Towards Unified Global Research

27 -31 October 2014

eResearch Australasia provides opportunities for delegates to engage, connect, and share their ideas concerning new information centric research capabilities, and how ICT helps researchers to collaborate, collect, manage, share, process, analyse, store, find, understand and re-use information.

http://conference.eresearch.edu.au

New Staff

Intersect welcomes Fred Etter as Project Manager on Time.intersect.org.au

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