Earth Sciences and beyond…

Why build an integrative Earth Science e-Research Infrastructure?

The Australian Continent is the platform on which we and most flora and fauna live; its soils are derived from the rock base, most of our water resources reside within it as groundwater, and it is the storehouse of future clean energy, as well as a potential sink for the green house gas emissions. Hence, many of today’s research challenges are geoscience related and include problems such as climate change, sustainable exploitation of energy, mineral and water resources, predicting living with extreme geological activity, and managing disaster reduction. Many of these problems can only be solved on a national, if not global scale. No single researcher, research institution, discipline or jurisdiction can provide the solutions. We increasingly need to embrace e-Research techniques and use the internet not only to access nationally distributed datasets, instruments and compute infrastructure, but also to build online, ‘virtual’ communities of globally dispersed researchers.

AuScope Grid: building an Earth Science e-Research Infrastructure

To solve the more complex research challenges of today, we need to build an e-Research Infrastructure to federate nationally distributed data sets, to develop tools to manipulate large data volumes and to establish an appropriate governance framework to ensure sustainability. AuScope Grid will comprise distributed data storage hardware, high bandwidth network links, data management protocols, middleware and software and will be the ‘glue’ that enables AuScope to be substantially more than the sum of its parts. A key challenge will be to link the major geoscience and geospatial data stores of the government agencies with the HPC resources and high bandwidth networks of the academic community: none currently are.

Beyond AuScope Grid: building links to NCRIS 5.16

A coordinated approach to data acquisition, analysis and simulation and modelling within the Earth Science community by itself is not sufficient. There has to be crosscapability communication to enable integration of the new AuScope compute and data grids with those of other NCRIS Capabilities (e.g. IMOS, TERN, Atlas of Living Australia) as well as other research communities (Water, Spatial). To achieve this, AuScope Grid will be built and maintained in conjunction with NCRIS 5.16 Platforms for Collaboration and much of the base computing technologies will be shared across other NCRIS Capabilities to gain better leverage of resources.

AuScope Grid: building a ‘virtual’ Community of Practice

AuScope has established a collaborative TWIKI website:https://twiki.auscope.org/. This online collaboration environment will facilitate effective communication, coordinate project development and lead to rapid dissemination of results. Each project has its own virtual community in which researchers can participate and comment on project directions. This open approach facilitates linkages between each community and enables common elements and generic workflow patterns across the communities to be leveraged and exploited. The AuScope TWIKI will enable greater cohesion across geographic and discipline boundaries and lead to the creation of a true online, ‘virtual’community of practice for geoscience and geospatial researchers.

For more information on current and potential projects or accessing AuScope’s Grid and Interoperability infrastructure component for a project of your own please contact the Program Director.

Program Director - Rob Woodcock
Email: Robert.Woodcock@csiro.au