The University of Tasmania is to play a role in the development of Australia’s 100-petabyte storage cloud.

 

A $50 million Federal Government project, part of the Super Science initiatives announced in the May Budget, the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project is intended to transform the way in which research data collections are stored and accessed nationally.

 

The first stage of the storage network will see the creation of five nodes (data stores). Four primary nodes are to be established in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Adelaide, with the additional node allocated to Tasmania.

 

UTAS will work with CSIRO, the Australian Antarctic Division and the State Government in establishing the Tasmanian node.

 

It is expected that the national storage network will by 2014 will offer Australian researchers access to around 100 petabytes of data (a petabyte is equivalent to 1000 terabytes or one quadrillion bytes).

 

"Tasmania has been at the forefront of the management of research data, nationally and internationally," the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Paddy Nixon, said.

 

"Our special area of interest is the marine, Antarctic and climate data sets and this facility will underpin the growth in size of Tasmania's research collections in these areas."

 

Professor Nathan Bindoff, IMAS, (pictured), who as Director for the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing led the UTAS proposal development, said: "This facility has occurred as a result of Tasmania leadership in marine observing systems such as the related Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) project.

 

"It is exciting stuff, because the research data storage will mean more of Tasmania's data collections will be more easily available to more researchers.

 

"This increased availability of data is going to lead to more discoveries about the oceans, Antarctica and climate change,” Prof Bindoff said.

 

The University of Queensland (UQ) is leading the program on behalf of the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.

 

According to Professor Max Lu, UQ’s Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, it could transform research in many areas including astronomy, genomics, physics and environmental studies.

“The recent announcement of Australia’s involvement in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an example of this rapidly growing area. SKA’s dishes will produce data each day equal to about 10 times the current global internet traffic,” he said.