VPAC advises the exciting new MASSIVE (Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment) supercomputer is open for general use.

MASSIVE is a collaboration of VPAC, the Australian Synchrotron, CSIRO, and Monash University, and is a component of the NCI Specialised Computational Facilities program. Additional funding was provided through the State Government of Victoria.

MASSIVE includes two 42 node IBM iDataplex systems, each having 84 nVidia M2070 GPUs, 504 Intel Westmere compute cores, and 2 TB of memory. Ten nodes are upgraded to advanced M2070Q GPUs and 192 GB memory each, and can be booked for interactive visualisation. Each system has a high performance GPFS parallel file system. Both Linux and Windows HPC Cluster based services are available. Projects and user accounts sponsored by the collaborating institutions can be applied for on-line at www.massive.org.au/access.

Priority will be given to:

• researchers who need MASSIVE’s impressive rendering and visualisation capabilities;
• members of the characterisation community who will use MASSIVE to reconstruct, analyse and visualise their data;
• researchers with applications that use GPU acceleration;

Access to MASSIVE is also available Australia-wide through the NCI Merit Allocation Scheme, which opens again in November. To apply for NCI merit access before the next round of merit allocations, please emailinfo@massive.org.au.

Further details about MASSIVE are available at www.massive.org.au and by contacting info@massive.org.au.

For further information on VPAC sponsored access, contact Phil Tannenbaum , VPAC Centre Manager.

VPAC is pleased to announce the availability to our Members of the exciting new system known as MASSIVE (Multi-modal Australian ScienceS Imaging and Visualisation Environment) located at the Australian Synchrotron (M1) and Monash University (M2).

MASSIVE is a collaboration between VPAC, the Australian Synchrotron, Monash University, and CSIRO, and is a component of the NCI Specialised Computational Facilities program.

The MASSIVE system consists of of 1,000 CPU-cores and 168 NVIDIA M2070 GPUs and will be open for general use in later March, at a date to be announced. Access can be arranged through your affiliation or collaborations with:

• Victorian University researchers through their VPAC Membership,
• Australian Synchrotron,
• CSIRO,
• Monash University, and
• NCI Merit Allocation (NCI Specialised Facility in Imaging and Visualisation).

Priority will be given to researchers needing MASSIVE’s impressive rendering and visualisation capabilities, including applications that are enabled to use GPUs (CUDA or OpenGL).

VPAC encourages users to develop and test their applications on the enrico node having dual C2050 GPUs, in preparation for access to MASSIVE. Visit the information page for more information on enrico.

The MASSIVE user environment will reflect VPAC systems, but neither M1 nor M2 will be integrated into VPAC. MASSIVE will have a comprehensive suite of software for imaging and visualisation, and support services in high performance computing, computational imaging, and visualisation. Additional applications that can take advantage of the systems can be requested.

Further details about the project are available at www.massive.org.au or by contacting info@massive.org.au

For the complete announcement of this system please visit the news page at www.vpac.org

Following on from the success of the ANITA meeting in Swinburne earlier this year (see last quarters newsletter for a summary) the 2011 meeting will be held in the ICRAR facilities in Perth. We are aiming for a larger student presence this year than previous and to that end are partnering the ANITA meeting with the Astro-informatics workshop later in the week.

Expect an email announcement soon but registration can be found at: ANITA ’011

The latest issue of the ANITA newsletter is now available for download here: ANITAnewsletterQ410

Let us know if there is anything you would like to see in future editions or if you have anything you would like to contribute, and we’ll do our best to fold it in to the next issue.

The Australian (and New Zealand) astronomy, nuclear physics, and earth science community has won the bid to have Australia host the 12th Nuclei in the Cosmos (NICXII) meeting in 2012. This is a prestigious multi-disciplinary symposium and the premier international meeting on Nuclear Astrophysics. It is held every two years and attracts about 300 scientists from around the world. Nuclei in the Cosmos brings together nuclear experimentalists, nuclear theorists, astronomers, theoretical astrophysicists, cosmochemists, and others interested in the scientific questions at the interface of nuclear physics and astrophysics.

For more information on the conference you can visit the webpage for this year’s event which was held in Heidelberg, Germany: http://www.lsw.uni-heidelberg.de/nic2010/index.phtml Sessions covered topics such as: the Big Bang, chemical evolution, stars, compact objects, supernovae, meteoritic analysis, and gamma-ray observations.

Australia has a large and growing community in Nuclear Astrophysics; 19 researchers from 7 different institutions and several major sponsors, including ANU, Monash, Swinburne, and AAO, were involved in the preparation of the bid.

The conference will be held at the Cairns Convention Centre from 5/8/2012 to 10/8/2012. The meeting will be contiguous with the Meteoritical Society meeting in Cairns (the week after) and close to the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in China (starting on the 20/8/2012). Preceeding NICXII there will be a week-long school for PhD students.

For more information please contact maria.lugaro@monash.edu

We are particularly interested in talks from representatives of large survey and simulation projects (current and future)

Important Dates
September 10, 2010: early deadline for registering an interest
in presenting a talk at the workshop if intending
to have a paper included in the IEEE proceedings
of the main conference;
October 7, 2010: final deadline to register for a talk;
November 30, 2010: final registration;
December 7, 2010: e-Science Astronomy and Astrophysics workshop
December 8-10, 2010: main IEEE e-Science conference

Summary
The focus of the workshop will be on e-Science challenges within
astronomy and astrophysics, the innovations that these challenges
are producing now and the innovations that will be required in the
near future. A particular aim is to discuss the needs of large
survey and simulation projects in terms of data management, data
distribution and data characterisation/analysis. The opportunity
to have this discussion amongst the broader e-Science community,
and the associated crossover of knowledge and ideas, will hopefully
enhance existing efforts in these areas.

The organising committee would welcome hearing from anyone
interested in attending the workshop and/or making a presentation
related to these themes.
Please register your interest at:

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/escience2010astro/

and we look forward to seeing you in Brisbane in early December.

Regards,
Jarrod Hurley (on behalf of the Organising Committee)

Although it may look like an ordinary shipping container on the outside, iVEC’s new POD (Performance Optimised Data Centre) from Hewlett-Packard will launch iVEC into the top 100 supercomputing centres on the planet.

The supercomputer system is part of the Commonwealth government’s $1.1 billion Super Science Initiative and will result in a massive increase in iVEC’s supercomputing capability, providing a major boost to the resources available to the radioastronomy, nanoscience, geoscience and other leading computational communities.

The POD design incorporates a modified shipping container architecture to create a ‘plug and play’ containerised server cluster that will allow the first phase of the Pawsey Centre project to be online by November 2010, only four months after the acquisition deal was finalised.

This purchase is the first step in creating a world-leading supercomputing architecture to enhance Australia and New Zealand’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The supercomputer, part of the $80M Pawsey Centre project, will be located at Murdoch University’s Centre for Comparative Genomics and will complement the $1 million iVEC infrastructure already housed at the Centre.

An energy-efficient 107 Teraflop system (1 Teraflop = One trillion floating point operations per second), the cluster uses HP ProLiant Blade servers with 9,600 cores and 500 terabytes of high performance storage. It will be part of iVEC’s data network, which operates at 10 gigabits per second.

For further information contact iVEC Media Officer, Brad Coleman on 08 6436 8920 or bradc@ivec.org.

About iVEC:
iVEC is an unincorporated joint venture of CSIRO and the four public WA universities.  iVEC fosters and promotes scientific and technological innovation through the provision of supercomputing and eResearch services to the research community, commercial organisations and government agencies. In 2009, iVEC was charged with establishing and operating the $80 million Pawsey Centre by the Australian government.

About the Pawsey Centre:
The Pawsey Centre (named after Dr Joseph Pawsey, an Australian pioneer in the field of radio astronomy) was officially launched by Senator Kim Carr, Federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research on 27 August 2009. The Centre will be located adjoining CSIRO’s Australian Resources Research Centre in the Technology Park, Perth, Western Australia. As a supercomputing facility, it is expected to be amongst the top 20 supercomputers in the world at the time of its commissioning in 2013.

Please feel free to grab the first edition of our newsletter, which is now live (download).

Comments and suggestions are most welcome (alan.duffy@icrar.org or richard.stancliffe@sci.monash.edu.au).