RMIT launches cloud supercomputing facility for industry

RMIT University has opened Australia’s first university cloud supercomputing facility to industry partners.

Dr Robert Shen, RACE director

While the AWS Cloud Supercomputing facility (RACE) opened to researchers in July, its public launch last night allows for external research partners to access the technology.

RACE director Dr Robert Shen told Digital Nation Australia that RMIT is still in conversations with a number of companies that are looking to utilise the facility, but they are unable to name them at this stage.

“We are currently supporting our researchers, academic staff, and students, but we will scale our service to support industry,” said Shen.

“We have a wide audience, including manufacturing, space, also including defence as well. There is a wide range of potential audience that may be able to use our service.”

The university claims that the supercomputer can test solutions up to 80 times faster than existing servers, allowing companies to fast-track new products to market.

According to Shen, “Research typically involves many failures before success: this facility lets researchers fail quickly so they can fine-tune their solutions and improve them.”  

Simon Elisha, AWS chief technologist for Australia and New Zealand believes that high-performance computing is key to solving some of the industry’s most complex problems.

“AWS’s portfolio of cloud services allows researchers at RMIT to focus on ground-breaking research, across a broad range of sectors, and innovate faster,” said Elisha.

“Using AWS, RMIT can securely deliver advanced computer performance, memory capacity, and scalability.” 

According to AARNet CEO Chris Hancock, RACE was designed to serve both current and future demand for high-speed internet and communication services available through the facility.

“The network AARNet has deployed for RACE is high capacity and engineered to scale to 400Gbps to provide RMIT researchers with plenty of headroom for transferring massive amounts of data to AWS on demand, now and into the future,” Hancock said.

One of the research teams currently leveraging the technology is led by Professor Matt Duckham, whose team is looking to design a way to pinpoint a location based on a verbal description of surroundings. The team are using satellite data, data from sensor networks and crowd-sourced data as part of their research.

“Enabling us to analyse these huge volumes of data from new sources can help better inform evidence-based policy decisions to improve public transport, traffic, infrastructure and many other aspects of quality of life,” said Duckham.