In this issue:

• eResearch Australasia 2009 conference;
• $80M High Performance Computing Centre for Perth;
• Bringing Underworld to the wider Geoscience research community;
• The Aus-e-Lit Project – facilitating the wide-spread adoption of eResearch Services by Australian Literary Scholars;
• AAF (Australian Access Federation Inc);
• Authentication and Authorisation: Australian Access Federation and ARCS Workshop, eResearch Australasia 2009;
• ARCS and CAUDIT firewall configuration agreement;
• The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project;
• The latest issue of the VeRSI eNewsletter is now available;
• The latest issue of AARNews from AARNet is available;
• About this newsletter
   

eResearch Australasia 2009 conference

Registration will open by the end of this week for eResearch Australasia 2009, to be held 9-13 November in Sydney at the Novotel Manly Pacific.  Register by 12 October for the Early Bird rate.  The programme has been published at www.eresearch.edu.au/programme and includes some excellent workshops -- be sure to have a look at these when you register.  Abstracts for all presentations and BoFs will be available soon. 

Poster submissions are still open until Monday 21 September.  See www.eresearch.edu.au/participation for details.  And don't forget the Visualization Challenge with a A$5,000 prize for the winning entry!  Entries are due by 6 October: www.eresearch.edu.au/vischallenge. 

Patricia McMillan
eResearch Australasia conference

$80M High Performance Computing Centre for Perth

As part of its "Super Science Initiative" announced in May's budget, the Commonwealth Government allocated $80 million to iVEC to establish a petascale supercomputing facility. A specific purpose building adjacent to the Australian Resources Research Centre at the WA Technology Park will be designed and constructed to house the high performance computing system. The supercomputer itself will be designed and assembled over the next four years. On the 27th August 2009, Senator Carr launched the centre and announced that it will be named The Pawsey High Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science after Dr Joseph Lade Pawsey (1908-1962), the father of radio-astronomy in Australia and one of the great pioneers in this field internationally. In addition to making a significant contribution to SKA science, the centre will be a world class hub for high performance computing that will support high end research in many disciplines.

Further information:
http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/$80MPERTHSUPERCOMPUTINGCENTRETOBOOSTSKABID.aspx
http://www.ivec.org/ForumAug09/

Professor Andrew Rohl
CEO, iVEC, 'The hub of advanced computing in Western Australia'
 

Bringing Underworld to the wider Geoscience research community

Underworld (http://www.underworldproject.org/) is a 3D, parallel finite element modelling code & framework, particularly well suited to long time scale geological processes such as basin to continent and ocean formation. It is under collaborative development by Monash University and VPAC, as part of the Victorian node (http://www.auscope.monash.edu.au/) of the NCRIS AuScope 'Simulation, Analysis, Modelling' (SAM) capability.

Through collaboration with the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS), Underworld is becoming increasingly accessible to Australian researchers. A recent hands-on Underworld Grid Workshop held at Monash University and supported by AuScope, ARCS, the Monash eResearch Centre, VPAC and iVEC enabled engagement with novice users and increased uptake and interest within the local Geoscience community.

Further collaborative activities between AuScope and ARCS have enabled stable releases of Underworld to be installed as modules on a wider range of ARCS Grid-enabled facilities, a tuned template developed for the ARCS Grid submission client Grisu, and an Underworld Workflow Application Programming Interface (API) that is being developed together with the AuScope Grid and Interoperability initiative. The underlying ARCS API will provide an infrastructure environment upon which other Australian eResearch end-user tools can also be built.

Further information from:

Steve Quenette, Project Director Underworld Project, steve@vpac.org (0438 558 275)
Wendy Mason, Underworld e-Research Officer, wendy.mason@sci.monash.edu.au (03 9905 1120)
Prof. Anthony Williams, ARCS Executive Director, anthony.williams@arcs.org.au (08 8303 3546)

The Aus-e-Lit Project – facilitating the wide-spread adoption of eResearch Services by Australian Literary Scholars

The Aus-e-Lit NeAT project is now one year old and the project is an exemplar of a successful collaboration between humanities researchers (the AustLit community studying Australian literature and Australian print culture) and eResearch developers (the eResearch Lab at the University of Queensland).

In the past year, the Aus-e-Lit project team has developed: federated and full-text search services; empirical reporting services; scholarly annotation services; and compound object authoring tools; for the Research Communities that use the AustLit Web Portal. The Federated Search services enable users to seamlessly search, retrieve and sort bibliographic content and images stored in databases and repositories across Australia and internationally. The empirical reporting services visualize the results of complex queries, using graphical reports as well as map-based and timeline-based interfaces. The collaborative annotation services enable users to collaboratively tag and annotate digital resources with keywords, notes, interpretations and queries – that can be shared and re-used to enrich the collection and enhance discovery. Finally the LORE, compound object authoring tool, is being used to model the relationships between and provenance of literary resources and to develop online learning resources.

Over the past year, the team has also presented papers and demonstrations at numerous national and international conferences including: the Oxford eResearch Conference 2008, International Digital Curation Conference 2008, Open Repositories 2009, Digital Humanities 2009 and the annual ASAL conference this year. Response from both user groups and eResearch developers has been overwhelmingly positive and has led to requests for extensions and refinements of the existing services as well as demand for new services such as social-network analysis and visualization tools for literary communities.

For more information on the project and resulting services, see the project website: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/

Professor Jane Hunter
School of ITEE, The University of Queensland

AAF (Australian Access Federation Inc)

This CAUDIT led pilot project was given a resounding vote of confidence by the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) in late June 2009 with CAUDIT being successful in obtaining a $2 million grant through Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to accelerate the uptake of the AAF by universities and research organisations as identity providers and to facilitate the substantial work of modifying and developing education and research services to make use of the AAF credentials.

AAF Inc. has been registered as an incorporated association in NSW with Richard Northam as the public officer. The CAUDIT Pilot AAF Steering Committee has transferred as allowed under the NSW Act to the Interim AAF Inc Executive Committee pending a general election in 2010. The AAF Inc Interim Executive Committee is as follows:

• President - Neil Thelander (QUT)
• Vice President - Paul Sherlock (UniSA)
• Secretary - Bruce Callow (Griffith)
• Treasurer - David Toll (CSIRO)
• Ordinary members - Anthony Williams (ARCS), Alan McMeekin (Monash), John Parry (UTas), Nick Tate (UQ), Garry Trinder (ECU).

A full time AAF Project Manager, Heath Marks, has been appointed and a contract signed with Macquarie University for two technical support staff to provide as needed hands-on support to institutions joining the federation.  The AAF web site has been launched www.aaf.edu.au.

Peter Nissen
Manager Strategic Initiatives, CAUDIT

Authentication and Authorisation: Australian Access Federation and ARCS Workshop, eResearch Australasia 2009

eResearch analysts, eResearch intermediaries who advise researchers on technology tools and services and researchers interested in authentication or authorisation solutions are invited to attend the Authentication and Authorisation: Australian Access Federation and ARCS workshop at this year's eResearch Australasia conference.

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) www.aaf.edu.au brings together cutting edge technologies as a framework for trusted electronic communications and collaboration within and between universities and research institutions in Australia and overseas. The AAF promotes seamless researcher, teacher and student mobility and inter-university collaboration via automatic identification services which allow authentication of people and resources between participating institutions. Similar federations are operational in the international community and the framework is rapidly becoming the common approach for managing and sharing resources.

The workshop will provide an overview of the AAF, what research and collaboration services are available (and planned) as well as provide the participant with information on how to get started in their own organisation. For more information see: http://www.eresearch.edu.au/2009ws9  

Heath Marks
Project Manager (Australian Access Federation Inc. - www.aaf.edu.au)

ARCS and CAUDIT firewall configuration agreement

The Australian Research Collaboration Service (www.arcs.org.au) and CAUDIT have together sought to agree a set of firewall configurations that will facilitate the provision of eResearch services. The aim of this understanding is to help both ARCS and CAUDIT members to be responsive to each other’s needs when ARCS services are used by CAUDIT member researchers.

Following feedback on the discussion paper circulated to CAUDIT members, recommendations were endorsed by the CAUDIT Executive on 29 July 2009 as a formal CAUDIT standard – see http://www.caudit.edu.au/index.php/dds/?cat_id=75#cat75. The Executive believes that the recommendations balance institutional risk and researcher requirements noting that the eResearch services are “on-net” and that most members will have deployed a perimeter firewall for collaborative activities.

Collaborative eResearch services, especially data services, are a priority of the Australian Government with the 2009 budget providing $182 million for the provision of ICT infrastructure across all states including data storage facilities, access and collaboration tools, and high bandwidth connections for research organisations.

Peter Nissen
Manager Strategic Initiatives, CAUDIT

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project

What is a VRE?
"...a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) is an an online framework of collaborative tools and resources that allow researchers to share and re-use data, combine services, and undertake tasks to promote new collaborative research practices...."

The VRE Collaborative Landscape Study project is one of several studies commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to research on-line research collaboration in Virtual Research Environments (VREs). The focus of our study is to scope developments in VREs around the world and set them in relation to the activities in the UK. The study aims to stimulate debate about the benefits of research collaboration facilitated by Virtual Research Environments so as to assist the JISC to provide services and strategies to support it. The project is being undertaken by the Centre for e-Research at King’s College London and the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

If you are a user, developer, or provide technical support for VREs, your input would be most welcome.

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/kcl/vrelandscape

Craig Bellamy
King's College London

The latest issue of the VeRSI eNewsletter is now available

It can be downloaded from http://www.versi.edu.au/downloads/VeRSIeNewsletter8.pdf.

In this issue you’ll read about:

• the life science computation seminar series, showcasing Victorian research and video-linked between La Trobe, Monash and Melbourne Universities
• VeRSI’s new logo that will be rolled out over the next few weeks
• VeRSI outreach activities at our University partners and eResearch Australasia
• Wendy Mason - eResearch Australiasia student bursary recipient, and
• Movember fundraising activities, VeRSI further supporting prostate cancer research

Gaby Bright
eResearch Communication, VeRSI

The latest issue of AARNews from AARNet is available

It can be downloaded from http://www.aarnet.edu.au/library/AARNews_Issue15.pdf.

The issue includes:

• Spotlight On – GeoDome
• Journalism research intersects with AARNet’s future
• Video Collaboration Conference at Monash University
• $16M invested in KAREN, the NZ NREN
• Off Peak Traffic charging trial
• Conference Reports – EDUCAUSE Australasia – Perth, WA and TERENA Networking Conference – Spain

Chris Hancock
Chief Executive Officer, AARNet Pty Ltd

About this newsletter

The eResearch newsletter is published the first business day of each month, and submissions are due two business days prior to that. Please send items to newsletter@eresearch.edu.au. Each item should be no more than 150 words plain text, plus a link to further information.

To subscribe to the newsletter and to the eresearch-announce mailing list, please send a plain text message to majordomo@eresearch.edu.au with the words subscribe eresearch-announce in the message body. (You can unsubscribe at any time by sending a plain text message with the words unsubscribe eresearch-announce to the same address.)

Patricia McMillan
eresearch-announce List Moderator