2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure

intersect with complementary environmental data sets. This systems approach
should lead to a greater ability to assess environmental impacts from population
expansion, and predict the effects of natural hazards on humans and
infrastructure.
The investments under the Sustainable Energy Future Capability area (Biofuels
and Fusion) have been limited and the EWG supports additional investment, not
only in the area of energy sources, but also research infrastructure to support
energy systems research. Investment in research infrastructure to support new
system-level energy research will be critical to decarbonise our electricity grid and
attract the much needed massive investments to urgently transform electricity
grid infrastructure.
1.C.1
What are your views on the existing funded facilities, including their ability
to meet the current and future research needs?
Section D: eResearch infrastructure needs
The EWG considers that data integration, transmission, storage and access to
simulations and models are an urgent priority.
While the existing facilities are making great progress in managing the
observational data streams, there is an urgent need to accelerate investment in
the necessary storage and access infrastructure and to ensure that all the data is
accessible, discoverable, interoperable and gathered and stored at the finest scale
possible.
The Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Research Data Storage
Infrastructure (RDSI) project and the National Research Network (NRN) projects
are contributing to improving these aspects, but more work is required.
Many of the Capability areas identified are reliant on access to supercomputing
capabilities to process the large volumes of data received through remote sensing
and ’omics based approaches, to undertake complex modelling and projection of
the climate system and the natural environment. The continued development of
the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is therefore vitally important.
For example, without urgent investment in the NCI storage capability, the next
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment will be complete
before Australian scientists have access to this important international petabyte
size data set that is critical to understanding Australia’s future climate.
As the sophistication and time-space resolution of earth system modelling is
extended it is reasonable to assume that Exabyte capability will be necessary to
support simulation experiments within the next five to ten years.
1.D.1
What are your views on the eResearch infrastructure identified, including
their relative priority and ability to support the current and future
eResearch infrastructure needs?
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