NCI and Singapore's National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) have connected Australian and Singaporean researchers at unprecedented speeds.
Today's research environments depend on collaboration, high-speed access to large datasets and high-performance computing resources.
To meet the needs of Australia, Singapore and the wider Asian research community, NCI in Australia and NSCC in Singapore, in collaboration with Australia's Academic Research Network (AARNet) and the Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN), have built the 'Asia Pacific Research Platform' for regional high-speed data sharing and the capability to share high-performance computing resources.
The Asia Pacific Research Platform allows movement of large amounts of scientific data at 10 to 100 Gbp/s between the peak supercomputer facilities of both nations.
This means researchers can now collaborate seamlessly across Australia and Singapore, and also the USA, via connection with the pioneering US National Research Platform.
The Asia Pacific Research Platform will facilitate connection to other pan-Asian research platforms through the SingAREN optical Open Exchange (SOE) and support a broad range of data-centric fields such as particle physics, astronomy, biomedicine, earth science and visualisation, which will benefit from the new data-sharing platform.
The cooperation between Australia and Singapore rests on several years of collaboration between NCI, NSCC and the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre of the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research on the InfiniCortex Project, which has seen global reach InfiniBand support successful demonstrations of prototype new high-performance computing services such as the InfiniCloud.
The launch of the Asia Pacific Research Platform paves the way for the next generation of 'in-place' access to data by remote computing facilities enabling researchers to utilise computing resources around the globe with no performance degradation and a more efficient use of global storage and energy.
Researchers and research infrastructure experts are currently meeting in Singapore at the Supercomputing Asia Conference to discuss cooperation and collaboration to realise the vision of the Global Research Platform.
