Content about Australasia

Announcement - NZ eResearch Symposium, 26-27 October, Auckland, New Zealand

The University of Auckland’s Fale Pasifika (above) is a traditional symbol of the Pacific Island. This Fale is the second largest such structure in the world. In addition to the traditional fale building, the Center complex includes academic offices, classrooms and a multi-media laboratory. Photo courtesy NZ eResearch Symposium

Register now for the 1st NZ eResearch Symposium online , to be held at the Owen G Glenn Building and the Fale Pasifika, at The University of Auckland.
Our NZ eResearch Symposium is a forum for NZ’s research sector and nascent eResearch community, being those involved in using, developing, and supporting applications and services that take advantage of distributed collaboration platforms for team science, including grid middleware, high performance computing, data infrastructure, advanced video-conferencing, and advanced research networks. This is also an opportunity to meet l

Feature - Australians launch new Compute Cloud

Image courtesy of ilco.

With the launch of their new Compute Cloud last month, the Australian Research Collaboration Service aims to bring user friendly grid and cloud computing to a whole new level.
“For the high-power HPC users, people who want to use all the features, GRISU provides a graphical user interface,” said Jim McGovern, a systems services manager at ARCS.
ARCS’ grid service GRISU, which sits atop Globus, provides Australian researchers and their colleagues with access to over 18,000 cores distributed across the nation. The Compute Cloud provides another layer, ultimately connecting researchers to the same resources GRISU accesses.
The Compute Cloud, McGovern explained, is ideally suited for less advanced users using standard packages.
As computational power has increased, computational methods have likewise become increasingly feasible for scientific disciplines not traditionally connected with grids,

Announcement - Gumboots for the Data Deluge workshop, 12 Feb, Melbourne, Australia

Image courtesy Shannon Pifko, stock.xchng

Places are still available (but not a lot) for “Gumboots for the Data Deluge: Defining and describing collections for the Australian Research Data Commons.”
This half-day workshop will be held in association with VALA 2010 in Melbourne on Friday, 12 February 2010.
Background: The notion of defining and describing data collections for Research Data Australia is a new and challenging one, and part of the task of creating an Australia Research Data Commons that will enable data sharing and re-use of valuable research data collections.
ANDS is building Research Data Australia as a set of interlinked, user-friendly web pages to display this rich descriptive information (metadata), harvested from a range of trusted online sources and held in a federation of online registries.
This workshop is designed to introduce the concepts and practices behind definin

Feature - Vietnam welcomes three new grid sites; hospitals get new ‘HOPE’

Participants from ACGRID school at Institute for Francophone Informatics (IFI) in Hanoi, October 2009. Image courtesy ACGRID. Image of Vietnamese flag on front page courtesy Wikipedia/Creative Commons

Vietnam hosts some of the world’s most biodiverse areas — with six biosphere reserves — along with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the third world and, as of last month, three of the newest grid sites to join the world’s largest grid computing infrastructure.EUAsiaGrid was launched in April of 2008 to foster grid computing technology within Asia, and to create ties between the e-Infrastructure communities of Asia and Europe. Last month, EUAsiaGrid partners co-organized with the French research institute Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) the second ACGRID school, or Advanced Computing and Grid Technologies for Research, to train current and up

Feature - BOINC gets social with Facebook

A screen shot of Progress Thru Processors.

For the first time, Facebook users are signing on to volunteer grid computing, thanks to a new application called Progress thru Processors.
“For all the promise of volunteer computing, the problem is that no one’s ever heard of it,” said Matt Blumberg, executive director of Grid Republic, “and that’s a big deal for a technology where the utility of the thing is a function of the number of people who participate.”
Progress thru Processors could change all that. The project was developed jointly by Intel, Grid Republic, and the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC, which was originally created at University of California at Berkeley to assist in analyzing data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), is the platform on which Grid Republic’s software is based. Progress thru Processors is an adaptation of Grid Republic’s so

Announcement - Call for participation: eResearch Australia, Sydney, November 09

Image courtesy of eresearch.edu.au

Event: eResearch Australia: No boundaries
Venue: Novotel Manly Pacific, Sydney, Australia
Dates:

Abstract submissions due (for presentations, BoFs, workshops): 29 JunePoster abstracts due: 21 SeptemberConference: 9-13 NovemberRegistration: (not yet available)

Meeting Web site
Call for participation
Contact

Researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines are invited to participate in eResearch Australasia 2009. This year's theme is No boundaries. What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?The conference features speakers and demonstrations from the Australian and international eResearch community and provides:

A catalyst for innovation and collaboration by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines
A forum to support the development, enhan

Announcement - Call for papers: 10th International conference on parallel computing technologies (PaCT-2009) Image courtesy of sscc.ru  Important dates:Submission of the full paper: 20 January 2009Deadline for extended abstracts: 5 February 2009Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2009Camera-ready version of accepted paper: 20 May 2009Conference: 31 August – 4 September 2009Venue: Novosibirsk, Russia Web site The conference's main topics include all aspects of parallel computer systems applications, methods and tools for parallel solution of large-scale problems, cellular automata and cellular neural networks, software for grid computing, languages, environment and software tools supporting parallel processing and others. We plan to publish the Conference Proceedings as a volume of the Springer Verlag LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) series and will distribute at the Conference. We also plan to publish selected papers in a special issue of one of the international journals.Contact informationPaCT-2009 Organis

Announcement - NOBUGS 2008, Sydney, Australia, 3-5 November Image courtesy of nbi.ansto.gov.au  New Opportunities for Better User Group Software (NOBUGS) 2008 The next New Opportunities for Better User Group Software meeting will be held in Sydney November 3-5. The aim of the NOBUGS series of conferences is to foster collaboration for developers of computer techniques in scientific instrumentation, especially as employed at large scale user facilities. The conference seeks to improve the user's scientific productivity by focusing on the interaction between the experimenter and the facilities' infrastructures, apparatus, and data.The 7th NOBUGS Conference will feature four themes:Collaborative software development chair: Brent Fultz, CalTechData management chair: Robert McGreevy, ISISData acquisition chair: Mark Knnecke, PSIGrid portals for users chair: Steve Miller, SNSDates (early bird registration, abstract submission and application for student funding are past):Mid-Sept. Selection for presentation29 September Acco

Feature - Malaysia’s grid grows in power The Petronas Towers at night, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.Image courtesy of Gregor Pogöschnik, sxc.hu (Editor’s note: We were curious about what people in other parts of the world have to say about the grid. Here’s an excerpt from Malaysia’s "Star Online.”)   Malaysia’s grid computing system, comprising several thousand CPUs at Mimos Bhd’s Technology Park Malaysia headquarters, has been successfully linked to to a European Union-supported grid called Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE).Mimos, an applied research organization, said its KnowledgeGrid Malaysia gained a substantial increase in computing power from the link-up with EGEE, which is made up of several clusters located in Germany, Britain, Austria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy and other nations. It will allow Malaysian researchers to collaborate more efficiently and easily with their counterparts outside the country.KnowledgeGrid went through a three-month vetting process with

Announcement - Registration open: Australian Access Federation Shibboleth Workshop, April, Australia Shibboleth is standards-based open source middleware which provides Web Single SignOn (SSO) across or within organizational boundaries, allowing sites to make informed authorization decisions in a privacy-preserving manner.Image courtesy of Internet2 Registration is now open for a free two-day Australian Access Federation Shibboleth Workshop, hosted by CSIRO in Canberra, Australia from 21-22 April 2008. Registration is on a first-come first-served basis.The workshop is aimed at providing background and necessary skills for Australian organizations to contribute their projects to the AAF. It covers technical information and guidance for participants to join the Shibboleth-based MAMS Testbed Federation.Objectives of this hands-on workshop:Participants will be able to Shibbolize service providers by themselves;Participants will be able to setup and manage their Identity Provider;Discussions on issues pertinent to AAF from perspective

Announcement - Registration open: APAN 26, August, New Zealand The extensive social program includes bungy jumping, jet boating, wine tasting and a spot of golf at Millbrook course, set against the backdrop of the Remarkables mountain range.Image courtesy of MillbrookRegistrations are now open for the APAN 26 Sustainable Networking conference, to be held 4-8 August 2008 in Queenstown, New Zealand.The five-day program will feature seminars, workshops and presentations from experts who are developing advanced network applications and middleware for medical, e-science, e-culture and natural resource research. The program will also include technology sessions in IPV6, network engineering and security.Sustainable NetworkingAPAN 26 is all about Sustainable Networking, which is interpreted as including three elements: environmental sustainability, regional sustainability and operational sustainability.This 26th APAN conference is being hosted for the first time in New Zealand by Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand Ltd

Announcement - Applications due March 30: Anita Borg Systers “Pass it on” grants These grants are called “Pass-It-On” grants because they come with the moral obligation to “pass on” the benefits gained from the grant. They are intended as means for women established in technological fields to support women seeking their place in the fields of technology.Image courtesy of the Anita Borg InstituteThe Anita Borg Institute Systers Online Community is offering a series of “Pass-It-On” Grants to honor Anita Borg’s desire to create a network of technical women helping one another.Applications are due 30 March 2008.Who can apply? The grants are open to any woman over 18 years old in or aspiring to be in the fields of computing. Grants are open to women in all countries and range from $500 to $1000.Applications covering a wide variety of needs and projects are encouraged, such as:Small grant to help with studies, job transfers or other transitions in lifeA broader project that b