Photograph: Chris Stacey

Guest writer:

David Hellaby has won 16 journalism awards in Australia and New Zealand during his 33- year career and has been a guest lecturer in journalism at several universities including The University of Queensland. A former investigative journalist and Courier-Mail Business Editor, he now owns and operates Meg A Byte Syndications, the largest provider of IT-related editorial in Australia. His articles and columns are published in 44 countries and on the Internet.

Research team:

Academics: Professor Kevin Burrage, Dr Lawrence Lau, Professor John Mattick, Dr Srdjan Nesic, Professor Peter Mora, Dr Stuart Phinn, Dr Sean Smith, Dr Graeme Hanson PhD students: Francis Clark and Larry Croft

Funding:

1997–1998 RIEF ($1.6 million) State Development (to QPSF) ($10 million) Australian Government DETYA Science Lectureship Initiative combined with University strategic funds ($1.26 million)

Email/Web link:

kb@maths.uq.edu.au ll@maths.uq.edu.au j.mattick@imb.uq.edu.au

Faculty of Engineering, Physical Sciences & Architecture · Faculty of Biological and Chemical Sciences

The University of Queensland is about to embark on an exciting new era of supercomputing that will open up virtual worlds as tiny as strands of DNA and as large as the Great Barrier Reef.

The University will use a $10 million State Government grant, along with further funds from the Federal Department of Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) and the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, to boost its existing supercomputing facilities and become part of a nationwide supercomputing network.

It will mean new jobs, new projects, a new venture into bioinformatics and a new facility for producing graduates for the new biotechnology industry.

Director of the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre Professor Kevin Burrage said the $10 million was to be spent over three years and be managed through the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation (QPSF), an organisation comprising all of the Queensland universities.

"The infrastructure that we put in place will have to support not only UQ but all of the member institutions in QPSF," he said.

"It has not finally been decided how the $10 million will be spent because it has to be approved by the Foundation and the State Development Department, but we are planning this year to put in up to 20 terabytes of mass storage and then put in a virtual reality laboratory as part of our existing visualisation laboratory (Visac)."

He said the new VR laboratory would have a complementary function to Boeing's System Analysis Laboratory.

Once the VR Laboratory and mass storage are in place, approval will be sought to either upgrade or replace the current supercomputer, 64-processor SGI Origin system currently capable of 24 gigaflops.

The University also has two Sun Microsystems Enterprise 10K Systems.

"We cannot say what the specifications of the new supercomputing hardware will be, but there is no doubt that the University will be getting something bigger than the 250-gigaflop system (capable of 250,000,000,000 operations per second) which will be installed in QUAKES (Queensland University Advanced Centre for Earthquake Studies) early next year for its Australian Solid Earth Simulator" Professor Burrage said.

"We will be looking at putting a proposal to QPSF and the State Government to enhance our supercomputing facility once the final approvals have been granted for the storage upgrade and virtual reality facility.

"We could have approval for the supercomputing infrastructure by the end of this year and could see the new equipment in place by the end of the first quarter of 2001."

Eventually UQ is expected to become part of a nationwide network of supercomputing resources.

He said the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) was installing a $10 million supercomputer at the Australian National University in Canberra, which was to be designated as a national facility.

"It will consist of 20 R-24 computers from Sun Microsystems, but it will not be up and running until the first quarter of next year (although a smaller system will be installed later in 2000) — about the same time that UQ expects to start upgrading its system," Professor Burrage said.

"As part of the APAC project there are a number of partnerships being established — essentially one for each state — and there is talk of co-ordinating supercomputing resources and linking them together so they act as one resource for some trial applications."

In the meantime there will be plenty of local projects for the VR Laboratory and upgraded supercomputing facilities at UQ.

They will be used extensively in the area of data-mining and visualisation in biotechnology.

The University of Queensland is currently advertising for six additional lecturers and senior lecturers to develop training in bioinformatics.

This major expansion in computational biology/bioinformatics has been made possible by a $1.26 million grant from the Australian Government under the DETYA Science Lectureships Initiative combined with University strategic funds.

Professor de Jersey, Head of the Biochemisrty Department, said one of the primary aims of the initiative was to develop and deliver innovative, cross disciplinaryeducation and training programs in computational biology in conjunction with industry and supported by collaborative research programs.

He said that the next 20 years would be a time of rapid and exciting development in the biotechnology industry and computational biology would be the cornerstone of the new industry.

The new facilities would be used to produce in the application of data-mining and visualisation to genomics and related areas of molecular and environmental biology relevant to the biotechnology industry.

"The key outcome would be graduates who possess the multi-disciplinary skills required by the industry," Professor de Jersey said.

Professor Burrage said the bioinformatics project had "a wide variety of different components" including the sequencing of genomes and the analysis of three-dimensional protein structures.

"I am involved in a project with Professor John Mattick (Director of the new Institute for Molecular Biology) and two PhD students Francis Clark and Larry Croft looking at the role of introns in organism evolutions," he said.

"In DNA make-up there are regions of genetic code called exons and introns. Exons can code for proteinsbut no-one really knows the role of introns.

"But more and more people now think they have a significant role and the interesting thing is that as an organism get more complex, the proportion of introns to exons increases all the time.

"It is a project that requires very substantial supercomputing."

The new facilities will be available for use by the Co-operative Research Centres and industry partners.

"There are other projects going on that require considerable data-mining, for example in the energy market, while in the environmental sciences there is considerable interest in monitoring pollution of our coastal waterways," Professor Burrage said.

"We are looking at modelling algal blooms in Moreton Bay; we have a project to develop a virtual environment so people can explore parts of the Great Barrier Reef in virtual Reality, and we intend doing the same thing in Moreton Bay, so you will be able to dive into a virtual world beneath the Bay."

UQ has been a leader in supercomputing in Australia for some time and the planned new facilities will ensure that it continues to play an important role in the future.

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