About Us
iVEC@UWA is a facility of iVEC on the University of Western Australia campus. The Facility hosts staff and infrastructure centred around high performance computing, visualisation, collaboration, image/video capture, and eResearch in general. The Facility acts as an interface between UWA users and iVEC, assisting UWA staff and students access similar or additional resources at the other iVEC Facilities.
The Facility hosts supercomputing hardware in a custom designed machine room and employs dedicated systems administrative staff. It also hosts supercomputing specialists to assist researchers make full use of the supercomputing resources managed by iVEC. The Facility houses the Fornax system, the second supercomputer installed as part of the Pawsey Centre project. It comprises of 96 nodes, each containing two 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs, an NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU and 72GB RAM as well as a 500TB global filesystem, in addition each node has an additional 7TB of local disk space.
Hardware, software and staff expertise are provided to support visualisation and virtual environments. In addition to high-end workstations, the Facility provides a number of novel visual environments, these include a stereoscopic 3D presentation wall, an immersive display in the form of a hemispherical projection surface, and a high resolution tiled display. A research interest in visualisation includes novel and engaging ways of presenting and exploring data, for example holography, rapid prototyping, and displays that exploit characteristics of the human visual system. Complementing the display technologies are various innovative video and photographic capture devices along with matching software solutions. Supported are cameras for stereoscopic filming, ultra-high resolution photography, panoramic photography, and surround video acquisition. These resources find application in a range of disciplines and they are also employed to create digital resources and engaging learning environments for education and public outreach.
Collaborative tools are provided through a dedicated room configured for video conferencing, this resource is additionally registered as an Access Grid (AG) quality centre. Staff provide consulting and operational support to other AG rooms on the UWA campus.
The Facility operates a video production service that includes high quality audio/video recording hardware, professional post-production software, and staff with extensive experience and expertise in the field. The staff can manage the whole production pipeline by providing pre-production advice, directing, storyboarding, performing the actual filming, handle the audio and lighting requirements, and the final post-production.
iVEC@UWA is physically located on the ground floor of the Physics building (visitor instructions), it is located administratively within the Faculty of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics.
The Centre was previously known as the Western Australia Supercomputer Program (WASP).