Abstract

The large distances that we face in Australia mean that electronically enabled remote collaborations are gaining traction. The Access Grid (AG), for multi-site, room-to-room meetings and collaborative working, is now widely used in the university sector. Decades of R&D and infrastructure building in High Performance Computing (HPC), cyber-infrastructure and now e-infrastructure, have led to a rich fabric of distributed computing, data and user interface technologies in Australia. We will present recent AG developments including shared files systems based on the Storage Resource Broker (SRB), shared software applications (eg molecular viewers, GIS) and High Definition Video capabilities, all integrated within the AG systems. These systems now provide a richer collaborative working environment for accessing e-infrastructure facilities.

About the speaker

Prof. Bernard Pailthorpe is a physicist who founded Sydney VisLab in 1992, to support computational and visualisation research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. During 1999-2000 he directed the scientific visualisation program for NPACI and SDSC at UCSD (USA). The group efforts there were focused on scalable volume visualization, and participated in the opening show for the Hayden Planetarium in New York. He now holds the Foundation Chair of Computational Science at UQ and is CEO of QCIF Ltd, an Australian HPC Consortium that supports industry and research projects, and develops cyberinfrastructure. He has wide experience in physics education and developing new classes in Computational Physics. He has advised Governments at senior levels on HPC and e-Research, leading to a new funding program to establish the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing in 2000.