Senator Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.
At the launch, Senator Carr said that modern science "depends on the ability to crunch numbers".
"It has been estimated that 487 billion gigabytes of new digital data was created in 2008. The Large Hardon Collider (LHC) will generate up to 1,600MB of data per second when it is in full operation ... data generated from Square Kilometer Array radio telescope, in one week of operation, will equal all the words ever spoken by humanity.
"All these numbers tell us we will struggle to achieve the research outcomes we are looking for without sufficient investment in cutting edge communications technology," he said.