The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre spent a week in Melbourne for eResearch Australasia 2018, which saw a record-breaking 392 delegates, 104 exhibitors and 252 workshop attendees. The conference is an opportunity for delegates to engage, connect and share their ideas and exemplars concerning new information centric research capabilities, and how information and communication technologies help researchers to collaborate, collect, manage, share, process, analyse, store, find, understand and re-use information
As such, the words on everyone’s lips have been collaboration and continuity – working together, now and in the future to better our work, expand our services and showcase our science and data.
So, it was no coincidence that all of Pawsey’s endeavours during the week were partnered with groups and organisations with similar goals and objectives. Pawsey announced in a Birds of Feather (BoF) of its collaboration with Centres across the Asian, Australian and Pacific regions. The BoF Advancing HPC and Data collaborations in Australasia was chaired by Pawsey’s Director of Strategic Projects and Engagement, Jenni Harrison. She was joined by collaborators within the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), National Computational Infrastructure and the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (REANNZ).
Jenni called for suggestions on what this collaborative group could be named – if you have any suggestions, email pr@pawsey.org.au.
Our exhibition booth was shared with the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) which saw large interest in how supercomputing and high performance computing works in Australia and the relationship between the two Tier-1 facilities. Promoting ourselves together at the conference was an excellent opportunity to showcase Australian science and collaboration in a demonstrative form.
The Centres also came together with a panel session between NCI Director Prof. Sean Smith, Pawsey Executive Director Mark Stickells and Kings College eResearch Director Jacky Pallas who gave their ideas on democratising eResearch. How do we bring down the invisible walls to grow our organisations for the greater good of the Nation and humanity? Be working together and increasing efficiencies to achieve the same goals, by destroying the gender and diversity gaps that are visible across most industries and by sharing information so larger groups can grow and benefit from the same datasets.
With other workshops, BoFs and presentations during the week, both Pawsey and NCI had a successful conference at eResearch Australasia and we’re looking forward to being back in 2019!
Pawsey & NCI at eResearch Australasia 2018
