RCC won an Australian Computer Society Digital Disruptors Award at a gala event in Sydney on Thursday, 2 November.
The ACS Digital Disruptors Awards focus on creative and positive disruption within ICT. ACS is the professional association for Australia’s ICT sector.
RCC won the award in the ‘Service transformation for the digital consumer—Government’ category for its Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure (MeDiCI) project.
MeDiCI is a data storage fabric developed and trialled at UQ that delivers data to researchers where needed at any time. The “magic” of MeDiCI is it offers the illusion of a single virtual data centre next door even when it is actually distributed over potentially very wide areas with varying network connectivity.
MeDiCI enables a range of techniques for national and international data sharing. Recent tests between UQ, the University of California, San Diego and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan indicated that MeDiCI can even support seamless access at very high data rates globally.
RCC is leading the MeDiCI project in collaboration with UQ Library, UQ’s ITS division and UQ research groups, such as the Queensland Brain Institute, Institute for Molecular Bioscience and Centre for Advanced Imaging.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson said the award affirms and recognises the work UQ is doing to deliver a scalable and affordable data fabric for its researchers.
“MeDiCI is somewhat unique because it supports an infrastructure that is distributed across the Brisbane metropolitan area. It allows us to integrate our scientific instruments, cloud and supercomputers and data archive in a way that is transparent to users,” he said.
“We won in the government section, and it acknowledges that we are transforming and disrupting the way we deliver infrastructure in the government sector. We are doing this with commercial off-the-shelf products, configured in a unique way, and we are able to leverage the best of commercial services such as data centres. This hybrid model means that it is not necessary for universities to necessarily do it all themselves.”
As an ACS Fellow, Prof. Abramson was personally pleased with this particular win.
“The Australian Computer Society is the peak professional body for IT in the country. Getting ACS recognition is rewarding because you are being judged by professionals who are validating the work you are doing,” he said.
This is not the first time the MeDiCI project has been nominated for an award. In June this year, the project received a merit certificate at the Queensland iAwards in the category ‘Infrastructure & Platforms Innovation of the Year’. For leading the project, RCC Director Prof. David Abramson was named as a finalist in this year’s ITnews Benchmark Awards for Education CIO of the Year.
