Four Research Computing Centre staff and three other University of Queensland staff will be involved in talks, panels and workshops at the eResearch Australasia conference at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) from 26–30 October 2026.
This year is the twentieth anniversary of the conference. To mark the occasion, the head of RCC’s organisational unit at UQ, Prof. Paul Bonnington, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research Infrastructure), who attended and contributed to the inaugural conference, will give a keynote presentation on Wednesday, 28 October.
Prof. Bonnington’s speech will cover defining moments, achievements and lessons from the past 20 years of eResearch, the community's most significant contributions, opportunities or challenges that should shape future direction, and observations on how the eResearch community has evolved and where it may be heading.
Also on Wednesday, 28 October, RCC Director Jake Carroll will give a talk titled: “From HPC to AI: UQ’s Journey Building an Open, Efficient Research Computing Platform with AMD Instinct and ROCm”.
The talk will cover how research computing is shifting from traditional high-performance computing into a fusion of AI, simulation, modelling, data analytics and generative AI.
For sector context, Jake will discuss how UQ is using technology company AMD’s CPUs and GPUs in the latest update of UQ supercomputer Bunya for high-memory capability, networking and cooling.
The AMD Instinct MI355X large-memory GPUs, and AI and HPC performance, help researchers run larger models, simulations and data workflows with less complexity.
UQ’s use of AMD ROCm software gives research teams an open pathway for GPU-accelerated HPC and AI workloads in heterogeneous environments.
In the talk’s abstract, Jake said: “UQ respects its researchers’ right to have a choice. UQ’s strategy is about matching the right architecture to the right workload – avoiding narrow single-system platform dependencies. Every research workload is unique, and each one has a value that may one day be societally impactful. Each must be treated with the right technology to underpin it.”
Jake will also be a panelist for the conference’s closing discussion, titled “Looking Forward,” on Thursday, 29 October.
His fellow panelists include those who have also built, operated and determined the eResearch infrastructure researchers use.
Other panelists include Luc Betbeder and Aditi Subramanya of AeRO, Vanessa Crosby (CSIRO), Hamish Holewa (ARDC), Ai-Lin Soo (AARNet), and Gin Tan (Monash University).
The panelists will share how their careers shaped their judgement, what changes they can see from the cutting-edge of technology, and what the next generation of research infrastructure—and the people who run it—will require. They will also answer questions from the audience.
IBM Senior Storage Technical Specialist Andrew Beattie will give a talk at eResAU2026 on Wednesday, 28 October, about Sovereign AI, which includes work he has been doing at UQ with RCC.
IBM and UQ have a formal partnership through the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation to help researchers address the challenges associated with extreme data growth, data organisation and data storage.
Please see the full list below of RCC, UQ and IBM activities at eResAU2026.
Hosted by Australasian eResearch Organisations (AeRO), eResAU2026 is a forum for everyone involved in enabling, supporting and advancing eResearch — from researchers, data specialists and research infrastructure providers, to technologists, librarians, policy makers, software developers and industry partners.
The conference, featuring both national and international experts, will examine how evolving digital technologies and information-centric approaches are transforming the way research is conducted — enabling collaboration, data stewardship, analysis, discovery and reuse across disciplines and sectors.
Pre- and post-conference workshops will be held on Monday and Friday, with the main program running from Tuesday to Thursday.
RCC, UQ and IBM activity at eResAU2026
- Monday, 26 October – Jake Carroll (RCC) – a short talk at the High-Performance Computing, Data and AI for Australia workshop being held by National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. Jake will speak about the future needs for data in science in the workshop session about data and repositories. (RCC Policy and Liaison Manager Dr Marlies Hankel will be a participant in this workshop.)
- Tuesday, 27 October, 11:40am-12pm – Sarah Walters (RCC) – “AI Services for Research: Building the Plane While Researchers Are Already Boarding” (birds of a feather [BoF] session).
- Tuesday, 27 October, 4:10pm-4:30pm – Dr Mahnoosh Hassankhani (UQ) – Social Science Research Infrastructure Network: Building Future Data Capability for Social Science eResearch in Australia (BoF)
- Wednesday, 28 October, 10am-10:30am – Prof. Paul Bonnington (UQ) – keynote presentation (talk)
- Wednesday, 28 October, 1:40pm-2pm – Andrew Beattie (IBM) – Building Sovereign Foundations for Agentic AI in eResearch (talk)
- Wednesday, 28 October, 2pm-2:20pm – Jake Carroll (RCC) – “From HPC to AI: UQ’s Journey Building an Open, Efficient Research Computing Platform with AMD Instinct and ROCm” (talk)
- Thursday, 29 October, 11:40am-12pm – Shelly Harris (RCC) – Beyond a Single Stack: How Increasing Hardware Diversity Shapes Bunya’s Software Build Strategy (talk)
- Thursday, 29 October, 12:20pm-12:40pm – Pravesh Kumar (RCC) – From Genomic Data to Breeding Decisions: A Web Platform for Visual Analytics and Decision Support in Barley Improvement (talk)
- Thursday, 29 October, 1:40pm-2pm – Dr Rubbiya Ali (UQ) – The PITSCHI Network: Navigating the Research Data Lifecycle Through Interconnected Research Outputs (talk)
- Thursday, 29 October, 3:50pm-4:30pm – Jake Carroll (RCC) – panelist on the “Looking Forward” closing discussion (panel).
