The buzz around Australian NeCTAR at ISGC 2011

Australia is a long long way away from the rest of the world – even from here in Taipei. This was brought home to me by one of my Australian colleagues, who told me “I like coming to Taipei, because it’s only a 12 hour flight away.” It was the ‘only’ in that sentence that really made me think! So using global resources is a particular challenge for Australian researchers, as they are so remote from many of their collaborators, even those in their own, rather sparsely populated country.

                                                             Relief map of Australia

At the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds event yesterday, Glenn Moloney from the University of Melbourne in Australia told us about an exciting new project, NeCTAR (National eResearch collaboration tools and resources ) set up to tackle these problems. To encourage international collaboration, the Australian Government has instigated a series of “Super Science” investments in areas such as data storage, HPC, networks and shared data. NeCTAR itself is part of the Shared Spaces and Infrastructure grant and is funded up until 2013. There are four streams for infrastructure development: Virtual laboratories, a national research cloud, software tools and a national server programme. They have a mandate to be responsive to the e-research sector and have already received expressions of interest from a host of universities in participating in the consultation process that is an integral part of the project.

The Virtual Labs will be formed around engaged Research Communities – those that are well described and offering significant research challenges, which can provide lessons for the rest of the community. They will integrate existing research and e-research capabilities and support research workflows across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

The Research Cloud will create an enduring, open, scalable national platform for deploying research applications and workflows. The scheme will fund cloud nodes to form a National Research Cloud, co-located where possible with Data Storage Nodes. They will then look at migrating research applications to the cloud infrastructure. NeCTAR is keen on exploiting opportunities for federation – outwardly with international research clouds and inwardly with emerging university research clouds.

NeCTAR will also produce research tools and software to support the grid and cloud activities, for example data repositories for crystallography data and web-based bioinformatics workflows. The National Server Programme will set up around 3 national nodes to support the expected 8 to 10 Virtual Labs, 6 cloud nodes and 20 migrated research applications.

The challenge will be to engage the research communities in a way that leads to firm commitments from them. “We plan to take a staged approach with early deliverables,” says Moloney. “We’re also very interested in international collaborations as well.”