Ministers for Innovation, Industry,  Science and Research

ANU NATIONAL COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE NATIONAL FACILITY

Australian National University  Acton, ACT

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Success in science these days very much depends on our ability to crunch numbers.

Capturing, managing, analysing and visualising data is now core business for all scientists -  including social scientists - whether their field is human health or astronomy, nanotechnology or  climate change, linguistics or economics.

It has been estimated that 487 billion gigabytes of new digital data were created in 2008.  (www.emc.com)

That may include a lot of YouTube videos, but it also includes vast amounts of scientific  information.

The Large Hadron Collider will generate up to 1,600 megabytes of data a second when it is fully  operational - and that’s after the raw signal has been heavily filtered.

Iconic undertakings such as the Human Genome Project would not have been possible without  massive computing power.

Professor Brian Boyle likes to tell us that the data generated by the Square Kilometre Array radio  telescope in one week of operation will equal all the words ever spoken by humanity.

Professor Boyle allows four bytes per word.

Since each of those bytes represents only one letter, that implies a lot of very terse remarks.

What all these numbers tell us is that we will struggle to achieve the research outcomes we are  looking for without significant investment in cutting-edge information and communication  technology.

National Computational Infrastructure

This need has been recognised by National Computational Infrastructure, whose mission is to  “provide Australian researchers with world-class, high end computing services”.

Innovation Minister > Senator the Hon Kim Carr



Speech

Senator the Hon Kim Carr

16 Nov 2009

Page 1 of 3 Minister - Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

NCI has grown out of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, which worked for eight  years with substantial Commonwealth backing:

z to build collaborations across the Australian research community and

z to create the APAC National Facility, which was established here at ANU in 2001 and

substantially upgraded in 2005.

The Commonwealth provided a further $26 million to transform the APAC National Facility into the  new NCI National Facility we are launching today, with a ten-fold increase in performance.

It is a credit to …

z the NCI Director, Professor Lindsay Botten and

z the NCI Project Steering Committee, chaired by Professor Mark Wainwright

… that they have been able to use this Commonwealth funding to attract co-investments from NCI  partners, including CSIRO.

Thanks to this outstanding teamwork, we now have a much more capable facility - a high-performance computing centre not just of national, but of international significance.

Super Science computing

The Commonwealth has provided a further boost to the development of large-scale collaborative  research infrastructure through the Super Science Initiative.

This is one of several new investments in this year’s Budget designed to advance the objectives of  our Powering Ideas innovation agenda.

The Super Science Initiative will give Australian researchers early access to the research tools of the  twenty-first century.

It will allow them to participate in the international search for solutions to our most pressing  problems - the problem of disease, the problem of energy insecurity, the problem of climate change.

It will also help us develop the materials, technologies and processes that will drive the industries of  the future.

The Super Science Initiative includes $130 million for two supercomputing projects.

These projects will support new collaborations and generate new e-research opportunities.

They will enable researchers to manage and analyse vast amounts of data - an incalculable number  of four byte words.

The first is the $80 million Pawsey High Performance Computing Centre for Square Kilometre  Array Science to be built in Perth.

The Pawsey Centre will process data from the Australian SKA Pathfinder radio-telescope at the  Murchison Radio Observatory - and one day, we hope, from the SKA itself.

It will also support high-end research in disciplines including nanotechnology, biotechnology, geo  informatics, engineering, atomic physics, chemistry, and mineralogy.

Page 2 of 3 Minister - Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

The second project is a $50 million make-over for this NCI National Facility.

The Super Science funding will be used to create new peak systems for climate change modelling,  earth systems science, water research, and other data-intensive studies.

These systems will be available to the widest possible range of NCI collaborators, including the  Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, and the ANU.

The research they do here will contribute in countless ways to our economic and social wellbeing.

It will help to drive the innovation we need to maintain Australian living standards.

The future

By the time it is operating around 2011, this will be the fourth generation of equipment deployed at  this facility in just a decade.

This is a measure of just how rapidly information and communication technology is advancing -  Moore’s law suggests that capacity doubles every two years.

The Government is determined to ensure that Australia keeps pace:

z not just by establishing a national supercomputing and data storage backbone for researchers

z but also by building the National Broadband Network, which will make high-speed digital

services available to all Australians.

It is therefore with great pleasure that I declare the NCI National Facility Mark III open - and look  forward to the birth of Mark IV in a couple of years’ time.









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