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Company Information

Date Established

VPAC was established in 2000 by a consortium of Victorian universities. In 2000, VPAC received funding from The Victorian Government through the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Initiative, which provided $6 million dollars over a period of three years. VPAC was launched to assist the Government to meet its commitment to enhancing Victoria's information and communications technology infrastructure and to provide Victorian researchers with access to computing systems far beyond the capacity previously available in Victoria.

Members and Major Collaborators

VPAC is a consortium of Victorian Universities who form VPAC's Members:

VPAC maintains collaborative relationships with the following R&D Organisations, Government Department and other Associations:

VPAC clients and partners also include:

Funding Received

Since its inception eight years ago, VPAC has been awarded an impressive total of $15 million worth of grants from the Victorian State Government, the Commonwealth’s Major National Research Facilities programme, APAC and other commonwealth and international bodies.

No. of Employees

73 employees

Key Facilities

VPAC operates a leading edge Supercomputing facility that provides Victorian researchers with access to state of the art Supercomputers and Software packages, Grid Computing services and Advanced Visualisation and Collaboration tools.

Supercomputers

AMD Opteron Linux Cluster (Tango)

  • 92 Compute Nodes
  • 2 x Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor 2212 (4 cores) per node
  • 24GB RAM per node
  • Infiniband Interconnect
  • CentOS 5

Power5 Linux Cluster (Edda)

  • 184 Power5 CPUs
  • 46 4 way Compute nodes
  • 23 nodes with 16G ram
  • 23 nodes with 8G ram
  • SLES 9 linux from SUSE

64 bit Opteron Linux Cluster (Wextan)

  • 32 Opteron 246 CPUs with 64 Gb Ram and 0.5 Terabytes of Hard Disk Storage
  • 16 IBM e325 nodes
  • Management/Logon Node
  • 1 x Dual Opteron 256 @ 2 GHz, with 4 Gb RAM, 36 Gb SCSI HDD
  • Compute Nodes: 15 x Dual Opteron 256 @ 2 Ghz, with 4 Gb RAM, 36 Gb SCSI HDD
  • Backbone Interconnect: Myrinet
  • Operating System: Fedora Core 5
  • Job Manager: Torque
  • System Software: Gcc
  • Intel Compiler

Software Packages & Tools

VPAC has a wide range of software tools and applications, both open source and commercial, available for its end users. More.

Grid Services

VPAC contributes to Grid Australia, a program established by the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS), a joint venture company, of which VPAC is the leading agent, borne out of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Grid Australia aims to provide long-term, coordinated, national eResearch support to the Australian research community.

VPAC manages Grid Australia’s 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.

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.

Advanced Visualisation Tools

AutoCRC participants have access to VPAC’s Engineering Visualisation (EV) Lab which provides participants with all the necessary equipment as well as in-house expertise needed to use computer visualisation to enhance the engineering and design processes. The EV Lab comprises an Immersive Stereo capable display system and a Six Degree of Freedom Tracking System which allows for advanced engineering review and collaboration application use. VPAC’s EV Lab provides AutoCRC participants with immersive and cluster-based visualisation tools for collaborative decision making and virtual engineering and product development.

For more information on the EV Lab, click here.

Collaboration Tools

Access Grid

The Access Grid is a worldwide collection of resources which allow multimedia displays, presentations and interactive environments, including group-to-group videoconferencing. There are several hundred access grid nodes worldwide, one of which is located at VPAC. There are 30 Access Grid nodes within Australia, allowing graduates and professionals to engage in collaborative research with peers within Australia and internationally. For technical specifications, please click here.

Management Tools

VPAC uses, supports and develops an number of web-based or enterprise-level management tools that foster collaboration between members of distributed project teams. For further information click here.