The national supercomputer and big data facilities of Australia and Singapore are enhancing cooperation and research to further improve technology, software development, staff and user training, and data sharing over the next three years.
For this, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) and the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore (NSCC) virtually signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) at the Australian National University and the Australian High Commission in Singapore, on the sidelines of the SupercomputingAsia 2022 (SCA22) conference in Singapore.
NCI Australia said the MoU “is the next step in a productive working relationship that will grow the capabilities of both centres and lead to advances in computational science software and the technical development of our staff”.
Users in both countries will benefit from improved training materials and future access to “novel computing technologies”.
As the supercomputing world progresses to exascale computing, NCI and NSCC “are working together to see how both centres’ capabilities can be geared up to keep in step with global high performance computing (HPC) developments.
Exascale computing refers to systems that are capable of performing a quintillion (10 to the power of 18) floating point operations per second (Flops).
Parts of the MoU will explore the potential of collaboration in the areas of HPC infrastructure and capability development, including in exascale systems, green data centre technologies, greater research network connectivity, and more secure data transfer using quantum encryption technology.
NSCC’s CEO, Associate Professor Tan Tin Wee said the two organisations “share a bond that stretches back to the early days of NSCC’s establishment (in 2015)”.
“NCI was one of the closest HPC centres that NSCC had reached out to in our journey to build a national supercomputing infrastructure for Singapore," Tan said.
He added that the MoU expands on the “already good foundations” that the two organisations have laid down and “sets our collaboration on a new and exciting path”.
NCI’s director, Professor Sean Smith said the two organisations “have been close collaborators for many years now”.
“We are extremely excited to continue to work with our NSCC colleagues to further the interests of supercomputing, big data and high throughput computing users in the Asia Pacific region,” he said.