Summary

In a bid to reduce time and financial constraints, the University of Queensland’s Microbial Genomics Lab is increasingly using free cloud computing resources, such as QCIF’s, for a range of ARC and NHMRC-funded projects that use genomics to investigate multi-drug resistant superbugs.

For the Lab, QCIF developed a customised version of a virtual laboratory compute cluster on QRIScloud, QCIF’s cloud computing service. This infrastructure will support rapid investigation of healthcare-associated bacterial outbreaks as part of the Queensland Genomics Health Alliance project.

The Microbial Genomics Lab previously relied on in-house IT hardware to run bioinformatics analyses, which require high-performance compute environments. However, increased computational demands, and associated administrative overheads, led the lab’s team to seek alternatives to obtaining and maintaining their own expensive HPC hardware.

During the last decade, wind erosion of soils has removed millions of tonnes of valuable topsoil from Australia’s agricultural and pastoral lands, reducing capacity to produce food and affecting the economy. The loss of topsoil can also negatively affect biodiversity, the climate and air and water quality.

During an Australian dust storm on 23 September 2009, more than 2.5 million tonnes of soil was blown off the Australian coast. The economic impact of this event on the NSW economy alone was conservatively estimated to be almost $300 million.

In the 1980s and 1990s big, buttery Chardonnay was the white wine to drink. A backlash eventually occurred and some drinkers began to ask for “ABC — anything but Chardonnay”.

Since then, the styles of Chardonnay available in Australia have broadened significantly and Chardonnay is making a deserved comeback. This is a testament to the great malleability of the variety and to the improved quality and diversity of available plant material. Plantings of this grape in Australia far outweigh any other white grape variety — in part because Chardonnay is an important component of sparkling wine.

As the world's fourth largest exporter of wine, Australia’s wine industry is very important to the nation’s economic health. With 18 per cent of all grape plantings in Australia being Chardonnay, the variety contributes significantly to the economy and viability of the wine industry.

The Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) in South Australia and Canada’s BC Genome Sciences Centre at the University of British Columbia are investigating the genetic make-up of the Chardonnay grape to help the industry better understand the variety.

2019

• 'Researchers use deep learning method to delve into predicting RNA structures in world first', Griffith University press release, 28 November 2019
• 'UQ extends data storage fabric to JCU', ITnews, 21 November 2019

2018

• 'Be thankful for sweet potatoes', MSUToday, 2 November 2018
• 'Queensland research cloud bulks up by 10PB, 2000 vCPUs', ITnews, 25 September 2018

2016

• 'Griffith Uni to rework HPC operations', ITnews, 26 September 2016
• 'University of Tasmania to install new supercomputing cluster', ITnews, 23 June 2016
• 'Queensland research cloud boosts HPC arsenal', ITnews, 1 June 2016
• 'Inside the tech supporting the bleeding edge of neuroscience', ITnews, 30 May 2016
• 'USQ prepares to launch new supercomputer', ITnews, 28 April 2016
• 'QLD Uni debuts its own data storage fabric', ITnews, 30 March 2016

2015

• 'Science can influence policy and benefit the public — here's how', The Conversation, 28 May 2015

QRIScloud’s special compute service has enabled a Griffith University PhD student to run document image retrieval experiments faster and with greater flexibility.

Ranju Mandal, at Griffith’s Gold Coast School of Information and Communication Technology, Is applying QRIScloud’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) node in his experiments. Together with a deep learning technique, his GPU algorithms can retrieve relevant documents by image queries into document repositories.

The goal of Mr Mandal’s research is to make querying and document retrieval based on images (e.g. a handwritten signature, seal or logo) in administrative documents a lot faster, making possible an automated process, rather than manual document scans. For example, a bank or other company could use the application to search its databases for documents featuring a particular signature.