Australian National Computational Infrastructure

Australian National Computational Infrastructure
Name	Australian National Computational Infrastructure
Formation	1990s
Headquarters	Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
Region served	Australia
Leader title	Director
Parent organization	Australian National University

Australian National Computational Infrastructure is a national high-performance computing facility based in Canberra associated with the Australian National University campus and national research ecosystem. It provides supercomputing resources, data services, and advanced research computing support to institutions including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland, and other universities and research agencies. The infrastructure underpins computational research across domains represented by institutes such as the CSIRO divisions, the Australian Research Council, and national facilities like the Trove and the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme.

History

The initiative began amid computing developments influenced by international centers such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts after Australian research policy reviews linked to the Higher Education Funding Act. Early milestones involved collaborations with the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, the Australian Academy of Science, and the Australian Research Council which placed emphasis on national capability similar to deployments at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory. Over time, major upgrades paralleled procurements from vendors like Cray Inc., Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, and integration with national initiatives such as the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme and programs funded by the Australian Government through agencies like the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

Infrastructure and Facilities

The facility hosts tiered systems including petascale-class supercomputers comparable to platforms at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative. Hardware generations have included architectures from NVIDIA, Intel Corporation, and AMD as well as network technologies from Cisco Systems and Mellanox Technologies. Data storage solutions align with standards promoted by the Open Science Grid, Australian Research Data Commons, and the Australian National Data Service. The Canberra campus integrates cooling and power engineering practices similar to those at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, with facility management informed by partnerships with the Australian Signals Directorate on security practices and the National Archives of Australia for data stewardship.

Services and Applications

Service offerings include batch scheduling, workflow orchestration, cloud-like virtual research environments inspired by models at the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, and domain-specific platforms supporting groups such as the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation climate teams, and computational chemistry groups at the Monash University. Application areas span computational biology used by teams at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Garvan Institute of Medical Research, climate modeling linked to the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, astrophysics collaborations with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science division, and materials science aligned with research at the CSIRO Manufacturing and the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering.

Governance and Funding

Governance involves partnerships with the Australian National University, the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme, and oversight consistent with policies from the Australian Research Council and funding mechanisms similar to the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Funding sources have included competitive grants from the Australian Government, cooperative agreements with state governments such as the New South Wales Government and the Victorian Government, and procurement contracts with industry partners like Dell Technologies, Lenovo, and Microsoft. Advisory input has been sought from panels featuring representatives from the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Council of Australian University Librarians, and international advisory bodies such as the GridPP consortium and the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network.

Research and Partnerships

Collaborations extend to national centers including the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, the National Imaging Facility, and the Australian Synchrotron, and international projects with the European Grid Infrastructure, the United States Department of Energy laboratories, and the Réseau National de Calcul Intensif. Research partnerships support multi-institutional teams at the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Australia, and the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security. Training and workforce development programs are coordinated with organizations such as the Australian Computer Society, the Software Sustainability Institute, and the Carnegie Mellon University collaborative initiatives.

Performance and Notable Projects

Performance milestones include sustained petaflop-scale benchmarks comparable to entries in the TOP500 and collaborations contributing compute cycles to international efforts like the World Community Grid and the Large Hadron Collider analysis via partner sites such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Notable projects supported research from climate reconstructions with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change author teams, genomic analyses for initiatives connected to the National Health and Medical Research Council, and radio astronomy surveys feeding into projects led by the Square Kilometre Array consortium and the Australian SKA Regional Centre. The facility has also enabled machine learning research in partnership with industry labs such as Google DeepMind and academic groups at the University of Oxford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Category:Supercomputer sites in Australia