MEDIA RELEASE
13 August 2020
The White House Office of Science and Technology has today announced that NCI Australia and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre have joined the US-led COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium.
Joining the esteemed group as a Collaborating Initiative, known as the ’Australian HPC COVID-19 Rapid Response (NCI Australia and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre)’, the Australian research facilities join the European Union’s PRACE as an international affiliated initiative.
The Consortium is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together government, industry and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on their world-class machines.
In April 2020 the two Australian HPC Centres joined efforts to open a rapid response call for COVID-19 researchers. Time is being made available on the Southern Hemisphere’s fastest supercomputer, NCI’s Gadi housed at The Australian National University, and Pawsey’s newly deployed cloud infrastructure, Nimbus, managed by Australia’s national science agency – CSIRO.
Supported by the Australian Government, three teams from across Australia are accessing 40 million hours of compute time on NCI’s state-of-the-art Gadi, along with five teams accessing multifunctional cloud capabilities using Pawsey’s Nimbus.
Projects of this scale would not be possible in Australia without the computer power available at the Tier-1 facilities.
The collaboration between the two centres and their newly commissioned infrastructure was key in enabling these projects rapid access to large-scale allocations.
Mark Stickells, Director of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, said “the global threat of COVID-19 demands that national and international experts work together to understand the virus, mitigate its spread and develop a vaccine.
“Pawsey’s collaboration with NCI brings Australian supercomputing expertise and infrastructure together to support advanced analysis and simulation, accelerating the work of our national research organisations and their partners.
“Australian government investment in both centres is vital to our efforts and supports both centres in joining this international HPC consortium,” he said.
Researchers are tackling the problem from many directions, including investigations into virus lineages, potential treatments and COVID-19 protein behaviour. Australian researchers are bringing their experience and innovative approaches to fighting the pandemic using all the supercomputer tools at their disposal.
Professor Sean Smith, NCI Director, said that researchers benefiting from the Australian HPC COVID-19 Rapid Response have vast experience and expertise in their fields.
"For decades supercomputing has enabled Australian scientists to tackle the greatest problems. Vaccine investigations and protein analysis have formed part of NCI's history, laying the groundwork for some of our major research user groups to rapidly pivot in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The value of the national computational infrastructure at NCI and Pawsey to support this research is clear as we harness our knowledge and experience to look for new answers," Professor Smith said.
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Media Enquires
Lucy Guest
NCI Communication Manager
Telephone: +61 2 6125 2547
Email: nci.communications@anu.edu.au
Karina Nunez
Pawsey Marketing & Events Manager
Mobile: +61 430 429 120
Email: pr@pawsey.org.au
About NCI Australia
NCI Australia is the nation’s most highly-integrated, high-performance research computing environment. Based at The Australian National University, it brings together the Australian Government, universities, national science agencies and industry. Key collaborating organisations include the ANU, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia.
The Gadi supercomputer has been funded with a $70M Australian Government NCRIS investment and delivered by Fujitsu Australia. Gadi is named in the local Ngunnawal language, meaning ’to search for’.
About Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is a world-class high-performance computing facility accelerating scientific discoveries for Australia’s researchers. It is an unincorporated joint venture between Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, and Western Australia’s four public universities supported by the WA and Federal governments. CSIRO manages Pawsey as a national research facility available to the broader science community.
Nimbus cloud offers on-site, flexible and fast high throughput compute (HTC) infrastructure complementary to Pawsey’s large-scale HPC facilities. Deployed in March 2020 the system is part of government funded $70m capital refresh project for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to accelerate Australia’s rate of scientific discovery.
