The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has published their FY2018 Annual Report. This Report showcases the breadth of research Pawsey supports and the people who are making it possible – researchers, our staff and the Board. It highlights the services and resources provided to the Australian research community along with the impact our expertise and infrastructure has had on several critical research projects.
John Langoulant, Chair of the Pawsey Board stated; “This year has seen major movements in policy, planning and placing the Centre firmly within the national research infrastructure and eResearch ecosystem, as we enter a new era of Australian supercomputing and data sciences.”
Addressing the need for investment in supercomputing and data infrastructure to maintain our Nations competitiveness on the global market, in April 2018 the Commonwealth Government and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure announced their commitment of $70 million to replace Pawsey’s aging infrastructure.
This year has seen the ongoing development of Pawsey as a collaboration hub, with a total of 194 projects making use of Pawsey infrastructure and supporting more than 1500 active researchers and nine Australian Research Centre of Excellence. Innovative opportunities have been offered to Pawsey researchers to take advantage of new capabilities, such as the recent upgrade that made Zeus, Pawsey’s new midrange cluster and the GPU nodes which have been added to the cloud service, Nimbus.
Ugo Varetto, Pawsey Acting Executive Director during the reporting period, emphasised the outcomes of our collaborative efforts, “our collaboration efforts have actively extended further afield. We have made considerable progress in formalising our collaborative relationship with the NCI, to consolidate knowledge and best practice between Australia’s two Tier 1 facilities. We have also developed formal relationships with equivalent international HPC centres in Singapore, Europe and the USA. These collaborations aim to contribute to building the Centre’s international reputation as well as translate into direct benefits for the Australian research community.”
Along with the infrastructure, Pawsey has also provided support and training to researchers, with more than 600 people attending training sessions delivered by Pawsey across Australia. In combination with the innovative activities undertaken this year to deliver training and information to a broader audience, Pawsey has significantly increased its reach and engagement through online training. Twelve talented undergraduate students joined Pawsey’s 10-week Summer Internship to learnt how to scale their projects in Magnus, Pawsey’s flagship system while they were also provided with scientific communication skills training to help them explain their project outcomes better.
Meet the people behind the science done at Pawsey, discover their impact in our society, find out how is the Facility accelerating scientific outcomes and enabling researchers to ask more questions, download Pawsey Annual Report 2017-2018
John Langoulant, Chairman of the Board
