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Media Release
$16.4 MILLION TO CONNECT AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS TO THE WORLD
11 December 2003 MIN 561/03
Australia’s research community is set to engage in greater international collaboration as part of a high-capacity optic fibre connection linking them to their overseas colleagues.
Over three years, the Australian Government will contribute a total of $16.4 million to the project which will provide Australian universities and research institutions with access to two high-bandwidth, trans-Pacific fibre optic cables to North America, Europe, Asia and Central and South America.
Each cable carries up to 10 Gigabits per second, the equivalent of approximately 4000 DVDs per hour. This is more than 30 times the current connection capacity.
More than 70% of all Australian higher education and research communication is international and is expected to grow significantly in the future.
The high-bandwidth connections will increase Australia’s chances of hosting internationally-funded research facilities, maintaining large-scale international datasets and participating more fully in international research collaboration.
The international connection complements the Government’s Australian Research and Education Network (AREN) initiative which has developed a national backbone to deliver high-speed connectivity to university campuses and research institutions across the country.
The initiative was brokered by the universities’ specialist telecommunications carrier AARNet, and the undersea cable provider Southern Cross Cable Network (SCCN). SCCN is sponsoring the dual 10Gbps fibre optic circuits between their cable landing sites in Sydney, Hawaii and the US west coast.
This is a very welcome contribution by SCCN and will be branded as “SX Lightwave TransPort” for Trans Pacific Optical Research Testbed. AARNet and a number of US partner universities and organisations will also contribute towards the overall cost of the project.
The Government’s $16.4 million contribution will be delivered from the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative which is part of the $3 billion innovation programme, Backing Australia’s Ability.
Further information on examples of research that will benefit from the trans-Pacific connection is attached.
Media contact:
Dr Nelson’s Office: Ross Hampton 0419 484 095
Dept of Education, Science & Training: Chris John 0412 650 549
Attachment
The presence of a high bandwidth (10Gbps) links between Australia and the US will provide tangible benefits for a wide range of research activity and facilitate international research collaboration. The following are just a few examples of major projects which stand to benefit.
Potential Benefits to Australian Bioinformatics Research
Bioinformatics research and related fields such as genomics, proteomics, molecular biology, molecular genetics, biomolecular chemistry, drug discovery, medicine and agriculture are heavily dependent on access to about 25 core international databases currently totalling about 10 terabytes of bioinformatics data and growing daily. Access to a further 300-500 more specialised databases are required to meet particular research and development needs.
Bioinformatics databases increasingly offer not only data, but also data models, analytical and visualisation tools, and annotation. This is especially true for the new databases that have arisen from genome projects: these are larger and more complicated than the core databases, and grow in size more rapidly.
Unlike researchers who use databases for search and retrieval, bioinformatics researchers often manipulate entire databases. For this, local copies are required and downloading a snapshot of a typical database (e.g. GenBank, from the US) costs several thousand dollars. The prospect of uncontrolled upload costs is a significant impediment to Australian sites interested in providing online bio-data and web/Grid tools in bioinformatics.
SX Lightwave TransPort connection to the US will assist Australian researchers to conduct competitive R&D in bioinformatics, properly protect IP more broadly across biomolecular sciences, and contribute data and tools to the international research communities.
Potential Benefits to the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator
The Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator (ACcESS) is a new Major National Research Facility (MNRF) that is being established during the next five years (http://www.access.edu.au/). The aim is to construct a simulator to enable the physical processes and dynamics of the solid earth to be simulated at scales ranging from global to microscopic. The simulator will need to link with international partners including members of the APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES) whose goal is to simulate the complete earthquake generation process and link complementary national earthquake simulation programmes involving some 50 research centres around the world (http://www.aces.org.au/).
Each simulation run may amount to 100's of terabytes (a trillion bytes) of data and multiple runs will typically be required to advance a particular research problem. Inadequate international network bandwidth acts as a severe inhibitor and currently researchers are forced to travel to overseas laboratories to conduct analyses. The SX Lightwave TransPort high bandwidth project will enable researchers to undertake analyses and simulations from their own universities or research labs.
For further information on the SX Lightwave TransPort, refer to http://www.aarnet.edu.au/news/
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