Overview of SAPAC

Mission

The mission of SAPAC is to enable discovery, innovation and collaboration by providing e-Research facilities, services, training and expertise for South Australian researchers. It is an unincorporated joint venture of the three South Australian Universities: the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and the University of South Australia .

SAPAC will be organised and managed in such a way that all of the relevant stakeholders for advanced and high-performance computing in South Australia have their needs met to the extent that resources permit.

Key Goals

SAPAC will attempt to meet a number of goals in relation to supporting advanced and high-performance computing in South Australia. These include:

• Facilities and Infrastructure: SAPAC will seek funding for and cooperatively manage and operate high-performance computing platforms to support the needs of the state's researchers requiring access to high-performance computing facilities.

• Education and Training for Researchers: This includes both researchers and postgraduate students and will be across a broad range of disciplines and problem types in advanced and high-performance computing techniques, including grid-based computing.

• Support for Undergraduate Education Programs: This will broadly build capability in the use of advanced, high-performance and grid-based computing techniques by introducing key concepts and expertise at the undergraduate level.

• Technology Diffusion: For industrial applications of advanced and high-performance computing, including relevant training and other forms of assistance for personnel in industry.

• Expertise and Research Program: As funding permits SAPAC will itself carry out research in selected areas of expertise to be determined by the SAPAC Management Committee in consultation with the SAPAC Steering Committee. Members and users of SAPAC facilities, in addition, bring extensive knowledge and research expertise in a wide variety of areas.

Relation to APAC

SAPAC exists independently of any relationship with the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), but serves as the vehicle for cooperation between South Australia and APAC.

Description

The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC) provides advanced High Performance Computing (HPC) and communications infrastructure and expertise for science and engineering applications in South Australia. SAPAC is an unincorporated joint venture of the three South Australian universities - the University of Adelaide, Flinders University and the University of South Australia.

SAPAC has an emphasis on cutting-edge high-performance parallel computing and grid computing. SAPAC promotes and facilitates the use of HPC to open promising new areas of research in all aspects of scientific endeavour; uses HPC to promote the excitement of complexity in scientific research to the public and to the government through visualizations, virtual reality, and other multimedia communication; and showcases what can be achieved in fundamental scientific research and discovery when such appropriate HPC tools are available.

As part of its mission, SAPAC manages its own HPC facilities and whatever joint facilities it and its partner research groups have in place. It is a focus of expertise, education and training in these areas and is interdisciplinary in its outlook. It brings together researchers from academia, government funded research organizations, and the commercial sector. SAPAC aims to build and focus diverse research strengths that can be significantly advanced by working cohesively together. Furthermore, the successful focussing of these strengths opens new and exciting research and partnership opportunities that would not otherwise be available. It provides higher degree and postdoctoral training and contributes to the undergraduate training program at the three universities. SAPAC is available to undertake contract research and consultancies on behalf of industry, government, community and regional groups.