RCC and UQ won a gold Australian Computer Society (ACS) Digital Disruptors Award at a gala event in Melbourne on Thursday, 1 November.
The ACS Digital Disruptors Awards focus on creative and positive disruption within ICT.
ACS is the professional association for Australia’s ICT sector.
UQ was one of three gold award winners in its category, ‘Service transformation for the digital consumer—Government’, with the Northern Territory Government taking the top category prize.
RCC and UQ won for its latest high-performance computer, Wiener, a specialist machine for processing large volumes of imaging data.
Wiener provides significant computing capability for enhancing images from UQ’s advanced microscopes, especially UQ’s new Lattice Light Sheet Microscope, which can generate up to 7 TBs of imaging data per day.
Wiener was built with funding from UQ and a consortium of the university’s various cutting-edge microscopy facilities housed within the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis (CMM), Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), and Queensland Brain Institute (QBI).
QBI in particular has worked closely with RCC to develop, trial and provide ongoing support for Wiener.
The supercomputer became fully operational in February this year.
RCC Director Professor David Abramson and UQ Associate Director of Institutes Research Computing Jake Carroll were at the ACS Digital Disruptors gala to claim the award.
Prof. Abramson said he was delighted to be one of the winning entries two years in a row.
“We have leveraged several disruptive technologies in Wiener to deliver stunning performance on key problems,” he said.
Last year, RCC and UQ won the top prize in the government category at the ACS Digital Disruptors Awards for its Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure (MeDiCI), a data storage fabric for transferring research data, with minimal researcher effort, between data storage facilities, computers and scientific instruments, on and off campus.
MeDiCI enables a range of techniques for national and international data sharing.
