Australia hopes to enter the ranks of the top ten countries in advanced computing with the launch of the Australian Partnership of Advanced Computing (APAC).
One of the main objectives of APAC "is to establish a national computing facility which will provide users with a peak computing system," said Professor John O'Callaghan, executive director of APAC.
The peak system will be more than 20 times larger than systems currently available in Australia.
"The capacity of these high-end systems doubles every year, faster than Moore's law which says computers double every 18 months," O'Callaghan said.
At the moment, the biggest capacity computer in the world is 2 terraflops. "That's 2 million million floating points per second, the equivalent of twenty thousand PCs," he said. "The goal of APAC is to have a system running at 1 terraflop by 2003."
Organisations such as universities, the CSIRO, and a few government departments have been invited to join the APAC and have offered contributions of over $70 million. $20 million of this will be Federal Government funding.
APAC hopes the system will be operational by March next year and has shortlisted Fujitsu, IBM and SunMircrosystems as suppliers.
The money will go towards developing advanced computing facilities and expertise, and to support users. The peak computing system will be based at the Australian National University in Canberra but there will be other facilities around Australia. Smaller mid-range facilities will be based at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney, the University of Queensland, Victoria and a smaller one in Perth.
O'Callaghan says that initially the main users for the peak system will be university researchers. "Universities don't have access to these type of facilities at the moment," he said.
At the moment, supercomputing is being driven by nuclear simulations, O'Callaghan says. Government defence research labs in the US use these facilities as a result of the test ban treaty for nuclear weapons.
Many of the applications already received to use the Australian facility are in the areas of chemistry, physics and mechanical engineering.
The super computers can handle the large amounts of data that these sciences use. They can sift, sort and analyse vast amounts of information and pull out patterns.
This is ideal for many chemistry applications such as understanding the nature of atoms, proteins and enzymes, which lead to the understanding of drugs and their impact on humans.
The computers can analyse human DNA, which has "billions of data sets," O'Callaghan said. The computers can search this space for different sets and combinations of genes and advance research in this area.
But the other key role of APAC is for the new facilities to "underpin the uptake of advanced computing by Australian industry," O'Callaghan said.
All the scientific applications will eventually flow-on to industry who increasingly need advanced computers, O'Callaghan said. Especially in areas such as oil exploration, mine planning, car crash simulations, new material designs, drug design, design of mechanical parts for cars and planes, chemical plants and in severe weather pattern predictions.
Eventually, the APAC is hoping industry will be able to access the supercomputers from their own desks, once problems such as network security and bandwidth have been addressed.
The system will be linked to other computing systems around Australia as part of an Australia-wide computing and communications infrastructure." O'Callaghan believes it will "fuel the demand for networks."
"It will boost Australia's telecommunications and communication infrastructure," and Australia will be able to "undertake leading research and development with international groups," he said.
Web access is already being done in US schools where students are accessing super computers to do projects such as water and air pollution. Small programs, with lots of computations which can detail the flow of smoke from chimneys in the air, or the flow of water in rivers.
"They learn to see the practical application of computers to their lives," he said.
