Mission and Aims of the CHPCA

The CHPCA is a research centre pursuing excellence in research in nonlinear and complex systems in scientific and engineering applications, In particular, it brings together researchers from fields as diverse as plant genomics to fluid dynamics to space plasmas, who use high-performance computing (HPC) to study complex and nonlinear systems. The Centre has an emphasis on cutting-edge Grid and Distributed Computing architectures as the tools of choice for attacking such problems. The Centre promotes and facilitates the use of HPC to open promising new areas of research in all aspects of scientific endeavour; uses HPC to promote the excitement of complexity in scientific research to the public and to the government through visualizations, virtual reality, and other multimedia communication; and showcases what can be achieved in fundamental scientific research and discovery when such appropriate HPC tools are available.

As part of its mission, the Centre manages its own HPC facilities and whatever joint facilities it and its partner research groups have in place. It is a focus of expertise and training in these areas and is interdisciplinary in its outlook. It brings together researchers from academia, government funded research organizations, and the private and industrial sector. The Centre aims to build and focus diverse research strengths that can be significantly advanced by working cohesively together. Furthermore, the successful focussing of these strengths opens new and exciting research and partnership opportunities that would not otherwise be available. It provides higher degree and postdoctoral training and contributes to the undergraduate training program at the University. The Centre is available to undertake contract research and consultancies on behalf of industry, government, community and regional groups wherever possible.

At present the Centre contains the National Computing Facility for Lattice Gauge Theory and its Orion Supercomputer (144 Gflops) and the South Australian Computational Chemistry Facility and its Perseus Pentium Cluster (113 Gflops). In addition, at the beginning of 2002 it will construct a new general use cluster of 250+ Gflops to complement Orion and Perseus. Over $400k of funding is already in place to do this.