MEDIA > History of iVEC

iVEC, ''The hub of advanced computing in Western Australia' was originally known as the Inveractive Virtual Environments Centre. In 2005 "iVEC" was changed to not be an acronym to reflect the wider audience iVEC was addressing.

The Interactive Virtual Environments Centre (IVEC) was established in June 2000 as an unincorporated joint venture between Central TAFE, CSIRO, Curtin University of Technology (Curtin University) and The University of Western Australia (UWA).

A business plan was submitted to the State Government, which approved funding of $1 million, augmenting similar commitments by the members. Federal funding of $1 million was also made available after IVEC successfully applied to become a partner in the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), leveraging an additional $1 million from the State Government.

The IVEC facility was opened by the Premier of Western Australia in May 2002 with the Directorate, High Performance Computing (HPC) and visualisation infrastructure located at the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC) facility, servicing the needs of CSIRO and Curtin University and additional facilities at UWA and Central TAFE, East Perth. These facilities were all connected by a fibre network, which also provided access to the Eastern States.

A bid for another three years of funding was submitted to the State Government in early 2005, with the joint venture partnership expanded to include Murdoch University. The Premier of Western Australia announced in July 2005 that the State Government would fund the next phase of iVEC to the tune of $3.1 million over three years, in addition to the almost $1.3 million from the partners and $1.2 million from APAC.

This significant commitment enables iVEC to achieve its new mission “to increase Western Australia’s innovative capacity and economic development through the exploration, evolution and exploitation of advanced computing technology, high-speed communications, scientific visualisation, grid technologies and e-Research infrastructure." IVEC the acronym was replaced with iVEC, ‘The hub of advanced computing in Western Australia’, to reflect the new mission.

The focus of the first year of the new phase of iVEC activities was the acquisition and installation of HPC and networking hardware to meet the greatly increasing demands of researchers in the State. With Murdoch University joining the venture, the iVEC network was extended to both Curtin and Murdoch, linking researchers at all the member sites. The link between the WASP facility at UWA and the ARRC facility was upgraded to 10 Gbps, to allow the resources at each facility to be fully harnessed.

The most significant development in 2005 was raising cash funding of $3.7 million for two new cutting-edge HPC infrastrucutre. The current iVEC infrastructure, Carlin, is rated at 0.026 teraflops whereas the two new systems deliver a combined capacity of almost 2 teraflops, an increase of almost two orders of magnitude. A 160 node Cray XT3 system with 330 GB of memory and 32 TB of disk will be installed at the new WASP facility. This machine will be a distributed memory system and will complement the shared memory 160 processor SGI Altix system with 320 GB of memory and 10 TB of disk at the ARRC facility. By efficiently harnessing the power in these supercomputers, Western Australian researchers will be able to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.

iVEC has continued to attract top quality staff members. A/Prof Andrew Rohl, who has a strong background in computational chemisty, became the full-time Director of iVEC. Dr Stuart Midgley was appointed as the Industry Uptake Program Leader. Dr Midgley came to Western Australia from the APAC National Facility in Canberra, and is one of the top HPC experts in the country. A/Prof Karen Haines, an expert in scientific visualisation, became the inaugural director of the WASP facility. iVEC continues to play a major role in APAC, particularly within the grid program. iVEC researchers continue to play a leading role in three of the six application projects, specifically geosciences, bioinformatics and astronomy.

A final highlight in 2005 was the level of leverage that iVEC was able to attract over the year. The $2.4 million investment from the WA State Government has been used to leverage $10.6 million ($4.6 million cash and $6.0 million in-kind). Significant commitments came from the Commonwealth Government, State Government funding agencies, APAC, the iVEC partners and the companies helping iVEC to become one of the leading advanced computing centres nationally.