RMIT reveals plans to launch supercomputing facility, first Australian university to reach milestone
Melbourne’s RMIT has revealed a plan to be Australia’s first university to launch a cloud supercomputing facility to boost its research capacity, with the cloud hosted on Amazon Web Services.
The supercomputing facility is expected to innovate the university’s research in manufacturing, space, financial technology and digital health by minimizing the university’s “research time.”
Specifically, RMIT hopes that the new offering will provide scalable and secure services to advance ongoing research in the fields of autonomous vehicles, genomic sequencing and atmospheric measurement, areas of study that cannot be conducted on older servers due to overwhelming requirements. data.
The university will partner with telecommunications company AARNet to achieve the feat, which will provide support with enhanced communications and Internet capabilities.
RMIT Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President of Digital Innovation, Professor Aleksandar Subic, welcomed the opportunity to enhance the university’s research capabilities and acknowledged the support of the Victorian Government.
“Our collaboration with AWS, Intel and AARNET to establish Australia’s first cloud supercomputing facility represents a step change in the way universities and industries access HPC capabilities for advanced data processing and computing.” “Subic said.
“By leveraging AWS Direct Connect, RMIT is poised to access tremendous HPC processing power using a single service model that provides seamless access to all our staff, researchers and students.
“Our industrial partners will also have access to the new cloud supercomputing facility through joint projects and programs.
“The facility will be operated by our researchers and students in another example that shows how industry engagement and work-integrated learning are in our DNA.”
AWS Director and National Lead for Global Public Sector in Australia and New Zealand, Iain Rouse, said the new capability will improve the university’s output by accelerating the amount of data the university can analyze.
“With access to the broadest and most comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, RMIT can innovate beyond the limitations of on-premise computing and keep up with scientific advances around the world,” Rouse said.
“We are proud to support innovative research initiatives in collaboration with RMIT, which will enable researchers, students and industry across a wide range of sectors to design solutions and bring them to market sooner, all of which would not be possible at the speed and scale without the elasticity of the cloud.
AARNet CEO Chris Hancock welcomed the opportunity to partner with RMIT to expand the university’s capabilities.
“We’ve also been connecting researchers to the cloud for many years, but nothing on this scale,” Hancock said.
“We are excited to partner with RMIT on this project which uses our ultra-fast network to remove the barrier of geography and distance for research in Australia and beyond.”
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