RCC has sponsored a UQ undergraduate student to undertake a research internship on ‘in-silico’ crops with the US National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Harry Guthrie will spend eight weeks across January and February 2019 at NCSA as part of RCC’s Queensland Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (QURPA) program.
He will join Edward Dann, a student from Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology, who is taking part in MURPA, the Monash equivalent of QURPA, both established by RCC Director Professor David Abramson.
The in-silico crops project the students will both work on involves researchers from NCSA, Monash’s Faculty of IT, and UQ’s Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI).
In order to understand how environmental conditions and crop structures impact pollination, the project aims to build 3D computer models of crops and set in place colonies of virtual bee-agents to forage on their flowers.
The ultimate aim will be to use the resulting models in simulations to test possible futures for insect behaviour and crop pollination to ensure the growing world population’s demands on agriculture can be met, despite climate change.
Mr Guthrie will be integrating the plant modelling software with the in-silico crops interface to run on the NCSA supercomputer, and Mr Dann will be handling the bee vision and behaviour modules.
Monash Associate Professor Alan Dorin, who, with NCSA, will jointly supervise Mr Dann’s research, said more than one-third of the world’s food depends on insect pollinators, especially bees, for its production.
“As the stability of our climate breaks down, this is impacting on the relationships between crops and pollinating insects in complex ways that are potentially catastrophic for food production. For instance, bees might no longer pollinate the same flowers they used to, potentially overlooking our crops for plants we would consider weeds. Or they might become less efficient pollinators of crops as their numbers drop. In short, we really don't know much about the reliability of such ecosystem services as those provided by pollinating insects under future scenarios,” said Dr Dorin.
Mr Guthrie, a software engineering undergraduate about to enter his fourth year within UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, said he is looking forward to working on a supercomputer and collaborating with NCSA.
“Working on this project is a chance for me to experience academic high-performance computing with real applications, and connect with people working in the scientific computing field,” he said.
RCC worked with NCSA on this year’s QURPA/MURPA seminar series, with eight seminars featuring 12 NCSA speakers connecting via video-link to UQ and Monash audiences across August and September. The seminars were recorded and uploaded to RCC’s YouTube channel.
