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Intersect is a not-for-profit venture, formed between the N.S.W. universities. As the peak body for eResearch in NSW, Intersect provides digital infrastructure (high-performance computing, cloud computing, data storage) and services (software engineering, analysis, data management) to NSW research institutions and inter-state consortia. In the last four years, Intersect has assisted hundreds of research groups, including allocating more than 50 million CPU-hours to researchers through our merit-allocation programs, delivering approximately 70 research and data management software applications, and assisting researchers with the IT components of approximately 65 grant applications. Disciplines with a regional, agricultural and ecological focus are crossing the threshold into intensive data and computational challenges, which will require new capabilities and capacities. The advent of genome-scale sequencing, pervasive sensor networks, video monitoring, and stochastic models of biological and ecological systems each present unique challenges in data storage, data sharing, computational analysis and modelling. They also open up new possibilities in the kinds of research questions that can be asked. The capacity for large-scale computational analysis and data management will be central to answering those questions. Intersect's current round of infrastructure roll-out, will make available to researchers 60 million CPU hours annually, more than 30PB of data storage, and more than 3,000 CPU nodes of cloud-based computing. |
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