Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

The Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) was developed to deliver the Interoperation and Collaboration Infrastructure (ICI) component of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) capability for Platforms for Collaboration. NCRIS, whose objective is to develop and fund national scientific research infrastructure projects, has awarded VPAC a total of $20 million to develop ARCS, a joint venture service consisting of service providers across Australia. ARCS aims to provide long-term, coordinated, national eResearch support to the Australian research community with activities that include, but are not limited to, the provision of interoperability and collaboration infrastructure and services. The inter-operation services will allow distributed, networked computing and data resources to appear to a user as an integrated, large virtual system that inter-operates seamlessly. The infrastructure and services provided by ARCS will be used by a wide variety of research disciplines.

Current and target user communities and research areas include biomolecular platforms, astronomy, Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), Structure and Evolution of the Australian Continent (AuScope), Biosecurity, Australian Environmental Observation Network (AEON), Climate Modelling, Computational Chemistry, Earth System Science and High Energy Physics.

Seamless access to research facilities and services around Australia

ARCS will improve access by researchers to digital repositories, scientific instruments, virtual environments and on-line collaborative interaction and seamless resource sharing. ARCS will also expand the facilities, services and user base of what was formerly known as the APAC Grid. ARCS aims to provide long-term, coordinated, national eResearch support to the Australian research community.

Effort is also being assigned to provide client and portal toolkits that will make it easier for application developers to utilise ARCS services, as well as tools to make it easier for researchers to use the infrastructure, such as generic job submission portals, and customised portals for particular applications and discipline areas.

Under the funding agreement, VPAC is the lead agent for ARCS. In addition to providing corporate services including finance, human resource management and corporate governance, VPAC is coordinating a number of technical efforts to ensure the smooth running of ARCS.

VPAC manages the ARCS Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate authority and Virtual Organisation Membership (VOM) Service and VOM Registration Service. In doing so, VPAC provides the backbone of the authentication and authorisation infrastructure of the Grid. Additionally, VPAC has developed and deployed a set of applications to simplify the Grid service and combat traditional user issues with Grid infrastructure.

Unlike some other large grids worldwide, ARCS has a very diverse and heterogeneous user base. This means that the Grid must support an enormous number of very different applications on many clusters throughout Australia. In response to this issue, VPAC has developed a generic Grid Client Framework that enables grid administrators as well as grid developers to add support for a new application in a very quick and easy way.

Internally, VPAC manages the communication infrastructure like email and instant messaging servers that all the members of ARCS use to work together efficiently across state borders. It also provides collaboration websites and tools to its members which are used to publish internal as well as external documentation.

To learn how to gain access to the Grid, click here. VPAC also houses an ARCS and Grid Computing Support Desk help@arcs.org.au.

Relevant Links

• Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) http://www.arcs.org.au/
• National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) http://www.ncris.dest.gov.au

Contact

For further information regarding ARCS, please contact David Bannon, Grid Operations Manager on david@vpac.org or phone +61 3 9925 4645.