Western Australia’s cutting-edge researchers start answering questions that haven’t even yet been asked.

Western Australia’s (WA) reputation for technological and educational excellence is about to go global, driven largely by the million radio antennas that will be distributed across the state’s desert by 2024. These antennas will be connected via networks so fast they haven’t yet been conceived, to deliver a deluge of data so massive that new ways of managing it will need to be invented. Today’s fastest supercomputers will have to be 100 times faster just to cope.

This ambitious mega-science project is the €1.5 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international effort to crack the unanswered questions of the Universe by collecting the whisper-faint radio waves produced by galaxies far, far away. Astronomers aren’t the only ones getting excited, either. As WA prepares for the 2018 launch of SKA Phase I, the state’s growing capacity in ICT and big data is attracting worldwide interest, investment and talent.

“The SKA is probably the 21st century’s biggest scientific project,” says Professor Deborah Terry, Vice-Chancellor of WA’s Curtin University. “It’s leading to huge capability in the state that will transform other industries.”

BIG SKIES

In 2011 Western Australia won the right to co-host the SKA, sharing the honours with South Africa, and has already constructed two precursor telescopes: the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP). Both are next-generation radio telescopes designed to stretch and test global technological capacities, and they’re supported by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, a world-class purpose-built infrastructure in WA’s Technology Park.

The Pawsey Centre was funded in 2008 with an A$80 million investment by Australia’s Federal Government, with another A$13 million in state government funding announced last year. Ongoing costs are covered by WA’s universities in partnership with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

The computer was clock-tested in 2015 and boasts 1.5 petaflops of power and 80 terabytes of storage. “We’re number 40 in the world in terms of research supercomputers,” says Paul Nicholls, Director of Strategic Projects (R&D) at Curtin University. The centre is linked to data centres at MWA and ASKAP via dedicated high-bandwidth optical fibre. Even the cooling system is innovative: it uses an underground aquifer to save 14.5 million litres of water and millions of dollars in energy bills every year.

Around 25% of computer time goes to WA’s biggest hitters, radioastronomy and geosciences, with the remainder shared between Pawsey’s partners or awarded gratis on the basis of merit. Curtin University, currently the centre’s biggest user, is investing heavily in agriculture and health science projects, Nicholls says.

To leverage the state’s new computing capacity, Curtin recently established a multi-disciplinary data visualisation facility – the Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch (HIVE) – and the Curtin Institute for Computation (CIC), which provides around 150 ICT researchers and PhD students with the tools and capacity to work on big data analytics, simulations and modelling optimisations.

“SKA has driven the innovation space, and now we’re looking at how the capability that’s been built around the major supercomputing and astronomy projects can be applied in other areas,” says Nicholls. “A lot of the problems they’re looking at are things like pattern recognition, anomaly detection, data rates, data compression, and so on. This is really leading-edge, with major supercomputers and network capability coming together. Industries in Western Australia, oil and gas companies and mining companies, are saying, ‘Hey, we have similar types of problems.’”

Known for its strengths in the mining and gas sector, WA’s rich history of invention has often been led by partnerships between the resources companies and universities.

“The ability of the resources sector, and their success through the recent boom – and beyond – was driven by innovation,” Terry says. “It wasn’t simply that the conditions were right, and that companies kept doing what they were always doing; they were innovating. That capability… is what will underpin the future economy of Western Australia.”

To foster further industry collaboration, in 2015 Curtin University partnered with Woodside and Cisco to establish on its Bentley campus one of only eight global Cisco Internet of Everything (IoE) Innovation Centres (CIIC). The result is a collaborative environment where WA’s SMEs can access and interact with mining giants and world-leading researchers focused on ground-breaking innovation.

NUMBER CRUNCHERS

As an example, Nicholls, explains, companies like Woodside have decades of production data, and can now analyse that data for ways to optimise their operations, transform their data processing, and prepare their business for market disruptions.

“We get their business and finance people and their data under an NDA, they meet the researchers… they have a look at the data and are coming up with some new insights into that data,” he says. “The data science space is a really fast cycle of innovation. Companies don’t want to spend years to try to get an answer. In the Cisco centre, SMEs can trial things, very low cost, very short time cycle.”

Professor Paul Johnson, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Western Australia (UWA), says big data innovation lies at the heart of the SKA challenge. “The Square Kilometre Array, for astronomers, is amazing,” he says. “But in terms of commercial application, it’s actually about how to deal with data, how to package it, how to transmit it, how to store it. Clearly we’re moving into an era of data-intensive discovery, and we don’t really know where it’s going to lead. It’s even difficult to imagine and describe it.”

Already in WA, mining giants like Rio Tinto or BHP are developing fully automated systems for their remote operations – including driverless vehicles, unmanned trains and robot drills – such that Perth-based operators will be able to control every facet of production from their desktops, more than 1000 km away.

“This is some of the highest tech activity you’ll find anywhere,” says Johnson. “When you think about high-precision robots, you generally don’t think about trucks holding 150 tons of iron ore. They are being driven from thousands of kilometres away, being loaded remotely, emptied out in 15 seconds, and then all this ore being shifted onto the carriers, driverless trains and the like. All this is done remotely, continuously and with great precision. My view is that the rhetoric around the boom and bust cycle is somewhat overdone… the Western Australian economy is undoubtedly going to remain a very, very prosperous economy.”