Thursday, August 20th 2009
Slides from the presentations at Monday's HPC Centre forum are now available.

Thursday, April 2nd 2009
The iVEC SKA dot Au Report on the opportunities for the Western Australian ICT sector in the development and operations of the Square Kilometre Array is exclusively available on this website.

Tuesday, March 24th 2009
Young Scientist of the Year Dr Ben Corry has developed a strong independent research career in the field of molecular biophysics and significantly advanced the understanding of biological ion channels - the proteins that regulate electrical signalling between cells.

"... because we're working at the molecular level, with all the atoms and molecules moving around, it takes a lot of computer power to simulate that in detail, so that's where iVEC comes in."

To see the full story please visit: ScienceNetwork WA

2007-2008
The 2007-2008 iVEC Annual Report is available in print form and is now also online, download the 2007-2008 iVEC Annual Report here: iVEC-AnnualReport 2007-2008.pdf (3.08 Mb)

Time:

3:30pm - 6:00pm

Description:

The Australian SKA Pathfinder and related rojects provide opportunities for local ICT companies. iVEC has recently joined the Australian SKA Industry Consortium, which comprises 23 major public and private sector organisations committed to the SKA. iVEC’s aim is to extend the influence of Western Australian ICT SMEs, promoting their expertise and capabilities to the consortium.

This briefing will outline what ICT opportunities are available locally and nationally, and when they will occur. Your involvement in ASKAIC via iVEC will also be discussed.

The briefing will commence at 3:30pm, followed by a sundowner at 5pm.

Time:

2:00pm - 3:00pm

Location:

ARRC Auditorium

Description:

The insatiable appetite for computing power worldwide finds many enterprises “scaling out” horizontally using an increasingly mature set of software tools and cloud computing facilities. But what about the majority of users who have limited finances with which to tackle increasingly challenging problems?

The over 1.2 billion desktop computers in the world represent computing power 200 times that of the top 500 supercomputers combined, and Nereus-V technology is the first credible candidate to make these available for productive use by leveraging the ubiquity, security and portability of the Java platform.

Nereus-V enables researchers to run their code on a donor’s desktop PC inside the secure sandbox of a standard Java Applet. The donor “joins” the Nereus-V network by simply clicking a link in their browser, thereby allowing their idle CPU time to become part of a pool of computing resources.

Research code is then distributed to this pool and executed within a standardised environment - leaving the project team to spend time on results rather than supporting a myriad of different hardware/software configurations. With billions of Java enabled browsers in the world, no separate client software needed, and no elevated privileges required, the Nereus-V system represents the simplest and most widely available mechanism to capture spare cycles for productive use.

This talk will describe NereusV, including live demonstrations, and will outline examples of its use studying Alzheimer’s disease, Astrophysics (similar to SETI@Home), Financial Modelling and Medical Imaging. The partner project, JPC (pure Java x86 emulator), will also be discussed as the means to run unmodified x86 code still inside the NereusV Java-only security sandbox.

Dr Rhys Newman has over 20 years experience as a software engineer in both industry and academia. Originally an applied mathematician at UWA, he completed his DPhil at Oxford in Computer Vision before working in Internet start ups and the finance industry. Since 2004 he has developed computer grid/cloud technology in Oxford Physics’ Interdisciplinary Grid Development group, resulting in JPC and NereusV being launched at JavaOne international Java developers’ conference in 2007 and 2009 respectively.