National Computational Infrastructure
NCI National Facility
Newsletter October 2006

Table of Contents

Call for Merit Allocations for 2007 A call for applications to the Merit Allocation Scheme for NEW and EXISTING projects for compute time from 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2007 is now open. The form also provides for applications for time on APAC partner systems via the National Grid.

Information on the Merit Scheme and how to submit applications is at http://nf.apac.edu.au/accounts/call_for_applications.php. Applications close on 6 November 2007. Please distribute this information to colleagues in your area.

Plans to transition to New Data System at the National Facility
AC change to SLES 10
Software update New software is continually being added to the AC. In particular there have been recent upgrades to dmol3 and more Matlab Statistics Toolbox licenses have been purchased.

Details on using software is given at http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/software/
Some packages have restricted access and these are marked accordingly and information given on the software web page.
Users are informed of new installations or updates in the message of the day at login.
Requests for new packages or updates can be made using the software request form.

Scope resource access extended to some partner facilities
APAC Summer School at QUT The APAC Summer School in Computational Science is being held in Brisbane at the QUT from December 4-8. It is funded by APAC to provide training in the techniques and tools of computational science. It is aimed at postgraduate students and completing honours students, but summer vacation scholars will also be considered. Interested academics are also able to attend.

The workshop will be of benefit to students who already have some experience in writing computer code and who are using or planning to use intense computations in their research. In particular the school may be of interest to people in the following disciplines, among others:

  • Mathematics
  • Computational Physics
  • Earth Sciences
  • Computational Chemistry
  • Bioinformatics
  • Econometrics

Applications for scholarships to the Summer School have now closed but more information can be obtained from the school web site, http://auriga.qut.edu.au:8080/apacsummerschool

OzViz 2006: October 30-31 at UWA The Western Australian Supercomputer Project (WASP) are hosting the fifth annual OzViz workshop.

The OzViz workshops are a chance for Australian visualisation and VR practioners to get together and share experiences. Works in progress and students talks are encouraged, as well as more visualisation research oriented presentations. To quote the web site - 'This workshop will be held in the spirit of previous ones: short, practical presentations by people who are active practitioners in the visualisation field.'

Summer Internships
APAC Courses Staff of the APAC National Facility provide a range of training courses on using the National Facility machines and programming techniques. The full list is given on the training web page. These courses have been updated to be relevant to the Altix Cluster and several of them have been held recently at ANU and iVec.

If you would like any of these courses given at a different partner site please contact us and it can be arranged. As these are hands-on courses we ask that a representative from the site arranges for access to a computer teaching lab with web access and a method of obtaining secure shell logins to the AC.

Staffing Updates
Email problems, suggestions, questions to