e-Research Office

The RMIT e-Research Office has been established to facilitate IT systems, software and services support to researchers with high-performance computing (HPC), high-bandwidth network and data-intensive collaborative spaces needs.

Services are centered on major research ICT infrastructure items, such as those funded through ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities grants, assistance with multi-institution and multi-disciplinary ICT support, and major state and national e-Research initiatives.

The e-Research office is conducting a survey regarding RMIT's HPC needs, which will enable the e-Research Office to:

• Offer software installation and upgrade support to our HPC community in RMIT through the ITS helpdesk
• Compile a web page of our ICT-enabled research projects
• Understand better the needs of HPC/Grid/Cloud-enabled research
• Represent RMIT in the Victorian and national e-research network

Other e-Research needs can be fielded by College representatives at the Research Technology Advisory Group. We welcome submissions for our agenda.

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e-Research Office

Role of the e-Research office

The e-Research Office will initially focus on research networks, more accessible high-performance computing resources and the looming compliance, storage and federated access issues surrounding research data curation.

Since 2008 RMIT-wide discussions and consultations regarding these issues have taken place via the Research Technology Advisory Group (RTAG). The recent Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) initiative of the Federal Government for example meets RMIT prepared.

It aims at data curation centres across Australia for:

• Capturing data and metadata from research instruments;
• Feeds of data collections from a range of public sector agencies;
• Enabling data/metadata management and sharing for universities;
• Managing research data beyond project lifetimes and catastrophic failures.

Adoption of an institution level e-research strategy arguably lends a competitive advantage to a university's research strengths and maximises both their sharing of resources and their opportunities for multi-disciplinary engagements within and across institutions.

RMIT’s e-Research Office reflects the capability of ICT to strategically accelerate and transform science and research across all disciplinary, institutional and global boundaries as well as service, nurture and sustain collaborative networks, research projects and partnerships.

More information

• Strategic E-Research support in Victoria’s universities - An open discussion paper (revision 23.04.2009)
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e-Research Office

History

Historically, university research support has evolved from just library and then administrative support of researchers to process, legal, and increasingly networking, IT infrastructure and collaboration services support. The term 'e-Research' (in Australia and the term 'e-Science' in the UK) reflects that ICT accelerates and transforms science and more generally research across all disciplines due to exponential increases in computational power, storage capacity and network bandwidth. Today e-Research support is strategic and follows the specialisation trend in nurturing and sustaining selected world-class and national research strengths.

e-Research in Victoria and nationally

Australia's e-Research agenda has been driven for over a decade by DEST and now Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR), with hundreds of millions in funding for university research ICT infrastruture, software and services and software development, targeting specific research communities.

With the recent establishment of the e-Research office, RMIT aims at improved networking, with respect to ICT support for research:-

• Between RMIT researchers, ITS, the library and Research and Innovation not the least;
• Between RMIT and e-Research Offices and Directors in other Universities, and,
• Between RMIT and National and State agencies that fund costly ICT infrastructure enabling research.

Many research administrators in Australia believe Victoria is leading Australia in e-Research. The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing for example was one of the first to be established in the Australian network. Monash's DVC(R) Professor Edwina Cornish took the lead in e-Research with the creation and substantial funding of the Monash e-Research Centre and a precursor e-Research Task Force positioning Monash since the time Victoria was bidding for the National Synchrotron and subsequently fostering synergies across Faculties and between Faculties and IT support.

The Victorian Government puts significant funding into the Victorian Life Sciences Computational Initiative at Melbourne University over the next few years (totalling some $100 million including the contribution of the University of Melbourne). Through NCRIS, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, the Commonwealth government is providing over $500 million targeting discipline-specific e-Research support, since 2005 and into 2012.

More information

• Strategic E-Research support in Victoria’s universities - An open discussion paper (revision 23.04.2009)
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• Services
• Projects
• Research Technology Advisory Group

e-Research Office

Links

• e-Research Australasia Conference
• Victorian e-Research Strategic Initiative (VeRSI)
• National e-Research
• Super Science Initiative
• Australian Research Collaboration Services (ARCS)
• Australian National Data Services (ANDS)
• National E-Research Architecture Taskforce (NeAT)
• RMIT Infrastructure, equipment and facilities

More information

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e-Research Office

Contact us

For all enquiries please email eresearch@rmit.edu.au

Professor Heinrich Schmidt	E-Research Director
Professor Salvy Russo	Deputy e-Research Director
Anton Demidov	Senior Systems Administrator
Dr Ian Thomas	Systems Administrator e-Research
Ravi Sreenivasamurthy	Software Engineer
Peter Wolynec	Systems Administrator
Venki Balasubramanian	Technical Officer
Judaline Fonceca	Personal Assistant to e-Research Director

The e-Research Office expert advisory group is formed by staff with distinguished expertise:

Craig Anderson	Library / Content provision / Rights management
Dr. Mark Gregory	Networks
Garry Keltie	Visualisation / Video conferencing
Dr. April Weiss	IT Services

More information

• Facilities
• Services
• Projects
• Research Technology Advisory Group