Cancer researchers level up their high performance computing

Researchers investigating cancer evolution and treatment resistance have successfully leveraged the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) program to expand their high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities.

A group within the Computational Biology Program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, led by Dr Anna Trigos, were offered guidance and access to national HPC resources through ABLeS. The Trigos Lab was supported to begin utilising the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre which significantly enhanced the lab's computational prowess.

The ABLeS experience helped the researchers to gain proficiency working portably across multiple large HPC environments, including a better understanding of the differences between their on-premise HPC and Pawsey’s Setonix, different scratch storage limitations, the portability and reproducibly benefits of setting up and utilising containers and Conda on HPC, as well as improving data management skills.

Members of the Trigos Lab Research group

The work served as a crucial feasibility study, providing insights that paved the way for the Trigos Lab to formally integrate external HPC resources into their research workflows. It also provided a vital head start for success in the competitive National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme.

Anna explained, “My team could demonstrate they could set up, test, benchmark, and optimise Nextflow pipelines critical for ongoing data processing. This experience put us in the right position to submit our first application for national compute, which was successful.”

Sharing her experiences with other ABLeS participants at the recent ABLeS User Meeting, Anna was happy to report the success of her Honours student David Le, whose analysis and simulation of 3D spatial cancer tissue data benefited greatly from the increased computational power.

The Trigos Lab focuses on understanding treatment resistance and response through the lens of both cancer evolution and ecosystems. While their primary focus is on multiple myeloma and prostate cancer, they also apply their methods to other cancers. They utilise omics data, including genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, and single-cell data, as well as patient imaging. Their methodology incorporates bioinformatics, computational biology, engineering, statistics, deep learning, and now HPC.

Learn more about Anna Trigos’ Multi-omic Evolution and Ecosystems Lab

Learn more about the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS)

Australian palaeoenvironments and biodiversity to be reconstructed through metagenomic analysis of sedimentary ancient DNA by national collaboration with Indigenous partners

Dr Vilma Pérez uses environmental DNA techniques to understand when and how environments have changed and responded to disturbances

A fascinating new project now has access to the specific computational resources required to build high resolution records of Australia’s changing ecosystems over the past millennium. The research will reconstruct Australian palaeoenvironments and biodiversity using metagenomic analysis of sedimentary ancient DNA collected from mainland Australia and the Torres Strait Islands as part of codesigned projects involving leading Australian researchers and Indigenous partner organisations. Streamlined bioinformatics analysis pipelines will be essential to process the large volume of samples expected to come in from this collaboration.

Sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) analysis is a transformative tool for studying past biodiversity and its responses to environmental, climatic, and human-induced change. The project aims to build capacity for the growth of sedaDNA research in Australia by automating bioinformatic analyses into a single Nextflow pipeline that can easily produce a robust and reproducible taxonomic profile of both modern and ancient target species found in sediment samples. BioCommons was keen to support the research with access to both ABLeS and our Australian Nextflow Seqera Service. 

This project is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF) which seeks to create a lasting impact by integrating Indigenous and Western knowledge frameworks to model environmental, cultural, and historical change in Australia over the past millennium and into the near future. 

Dr Vilma Pérez is an environmental microbial ecologist at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, The University of Adelaide, who can now access the national computational infrastructure she needs for her research after being onboarded to BioCommons’ ABLeS and Seqera services. Vilma's expertise in using environmental DNA techniques to understand when and how environments have changed and responded to disturbances will be put to good use in CIEHF’s novel genetics research program.

Led by CIEHF Chief Investigator Assoc Prof Ray Tobler from the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative at the Australian National University, the research program will use high-resolution landscape genomic analyses of selected Australian native flora and fauna, as well as ancient DNA recovered from archaeological sediments (sedaDNA).

This work will help reconstruct past Australian ecosystems to understand how biodiversity, from microbes to plants and animals, has changed over time, and how it has responded to environmental shifts, including Indigenous Australian landscape management practices that have helped care for Country for thousands of years.

Gaining access to the right computing infrastructure is one thing, but appropriate computing and data management mechanisms are needed to ensure that Indigenous genomic data resources are ethically managed to the benefit of Indigenous Australians. Mutual partners, Bioplatforms Australia, were able to connect CIEHF with colleagues at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) who are working with the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) to host their sensitive sequencing data. Given Indigenous genetics research requires unique ethical approaches, NCIG is leading the way in building a genome resource for the research community under Indigenous Governance and will no doubt have many insights to share. 

As part of our ongoing support for CIEHF, Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan, Product Manager - Bioinformatics Platforms at BioCommons, and Dr Kelly Scarlett, Manager - Partnerships and Engagement at Bioplatforms Australia will participate in an upcoming sedaDNA workshop hosted by CIEHF researchers at the University of Adelaide.

This workshop sits within the Genomics research stream which is part of a suite of nine chosen to ensure a holistic, interdisciplinary approach. Find out more about how CIEHF’s research streams are addressing unique environmental, cultural, and historical complexities of Australia through an integrated approach, leveraging both Indigenous knowledge systems and researcher’s fields of expertise. 

Knowledge sharing enABLeS computational research across the life sciences

ABLeS (Australian BioCommons Leadership Share) supports groups with their shared data-driven bioinformatics needs, who bring with them a wide range of computational research programs. The research groups benefiting from the program wouldn’t normally have an avenue to share insights and learn from each other’s experiences. 

The ABLeS program now includes more than 250 registered participants, representing more than 50 Australian research institutions and a wonderfully diverse array of research projects. The ABLeS User Group Meeting offers opportunities to come together to share knowledge, offer tips, ask questions or give feedback. 

Held twice a year, the ABLeS User Group meeting includes presentations from researchers about how they are making use of their allocated computational resources, alongside updates on pertinent developments at both of the Australian peak computational facilities, Pawsey and NCI. This online forum is also a chance to ask questions or provide feedback on how ABLeS can be improved to help different researcher needs.

A poll at the latest User Group meeting suggested an octopus mascot for ABLeS!

At the last meeting, users heard from three different researchers whose projects receive ABLeS resources:

• Computational Structural Biology Node, Dr Keiran Rowell (UNSW)

• The Effect of a Mediterranean Diet on Blood DNA Methylation Profiles in Pregnant Women, Grace Tavelli (The Kids) 

• Rare Disease Genetics and Functional Genomics, Assoc Prof Gina Ravenscroft (Perkins Institute) 

Given that it was the inaugural ABLeS User Group Meeting, the event opened with a fun activity to find a mascot for the ABLeS service. The most popular option amongst the 39 people attending was a friendly octopus. The ABLeS team is still trying to decipher any hidden message in that choice! Other interesting results from the poll were that the majority of participants joined from NSW and WA, and two thirds of those users were working on non-human species.

The next ABLeS User Group Meeting will take place online on 2 June 2025. Registered users of ABLeS should keep an eye on their inbox for their invitation to attend. 

If you aren’t yet registered for ABLeS, you can find out more in this 10 min video explainer or jump straight into the ABLeS documentation.

ABLeS (Australian BioCommons Leadership Share) was established in 2021 to support data-driven bioinformatics. Australian BioCommons partners with Bioplatforms Australia, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey).

Pawsey enables more flexible and scalable DNA analysis

This story about researchers accessing high performance computing via the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) was first published by the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.

Dr Hasindu Gamaarachchi and Bonson Wong, the researchers behind Slorado, the new open source software for nanopore sequencing basecalling on AMD GPUs. Credits UNSW Sydney

Researchers from UNSW Sydney and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have developed Slorado, the first open-source software/library solution for nanopore sequencing basecalling on AMD Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). Using Setonix, Australia’s most powerful supercomputer at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, this development enables researchers worldwide to process nanopore sequencing data on any mainstream GPU hardware for the first time, expanding computational options for the global bioinformatics community.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencers generate time-series raw signals that need to be converted into DNA bases through a process called basecalling. While ONT’s Dorado software supports NVIDIA GPUs for this process, AMD GPUs are currently not supported.

Led by Dr Hasindu Gamaarachchi and PhD candidate Bonson Wong, the team has created a streamlined version of the industry-standard Dorado basecaller that removes previous hardware limitations while maintaining and in some cases increasing performance. This innovation allows researchers to utilise AMD GPUs, including those in Pawsey’s Setonix, Australia’s fastest and most energy-efficient research supercomputer, reducing processing times and wait periods for critical genomic research.

Pawsey CEO Mark Stickells underscored the impact of this development:
“Dr Gamaarachchi’s work highlights our mission to accelerate scientific discovery. Fast, efficient bioinformatics is key to addressing challenges in medicine and biotechnology, from genomic analysis to drug discovery and personalised medicine. By enabling nanopore sequencing on Setonix’s AMD GPUs, we are breaking down computational barriers and empowering researchers with world-class tools,” Mark said.

“This collaboration demonstrates how state-of-the-art infrastructure can transform research workflows and broaden access to advanced computational tools.” He continued.

Dr Gamaarachchi and Bonson Wong shared their vision for Slorado:
”Our goal was to expand computational options for the bioinformatics community. By enabling basecalling on AMD GPUs and making the software fully open-source, we are empowering researchers to process their data more efficiently using both AMD and NVIDIA hardware.”

Slorado supports up to eight GPUs simultaneously on the same node, delivering unprecedented processing capabilities when combined with systems like Setonix. Researchers can now achieve faster results without enduring lengthy queue times, accelerating the pace of critical genomic discoveries.

The team access to Setonix has been supported via the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS).

To know more about Slorado, register for an online event on 18 Mar 2025:

Accelerating Nanopore Analysis: Introducing the new Open Source Slorado.

Supercomputing access powers development of a new multi-omics resource

A new bioinformatics platform to support multi omics has been released by Australian members of the International Cannabis Genomics Research Consortium (ICGRC). The web accessible platform is designed for data sharing, hosting and analysis and is freely available for the global cannabis research community to use. 

Researchers from Southern Cross University, Locedie Manseuto and Dr Ramil Mauleon wanted to build an authoritative, open-science focused, web portal that would support multi-omics research on Cannabis sativa. Leveraging their ongoing connection to Australian BioCommons via the multi-omics community, Loc and Mau sought support from the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) to help build a key feature of the web portal: CannSeek. The CannSeek database contains approximately 100 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced ‘snips’). As part of his PhD thesis, Loc produced CannSeek with support from the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS):

We needed access to a large supercomputing allocation to allow us to analyse the entire collection of multi-sample Cannabis sativa next-generation sequencing data available in NCBI (over 2,500 samples in Dec 2022). Our allocation on NCI’s Gadi supercomputer via ABLeS was instrumental in analysing such a large quantity of sequence data.

Loc continued to work on Gadi to optimise a variant calling pipeline that combines both GATK and Parabricks software.

We deployed the optimised variant calling pipeline to compare three reference genomes with the 2,500 next-generation sequencing samples. We identified 90-100 million SNPs that form the CannSeek database. Compare this to the roughly 30 million SNPs from 3,000 rice samples and you can see why we needed the supercomputing resources!

Mau notes that the computational challenges didn’t end there:

The Gadi supercomputer was equally instrumental in solving our next challenge of finding a small (~1,500) subset of SNPs from the CannSeek database that would allow fingerprinting and differentiation of samples from the Cannabis sativa population. The small subset was critical to prepare, as it’s far too expensive to use ~30M SNPs for routine sample fingerprinting!

The ICGRC web portal contains several other omics tools like a JBrowse genome browser, a gene function database search, and an expression heatmap.

Learn more about the development of the ICGRC portal and the CannSeek database:

• Read: Building a community-driven bioinformatics platform to facilitate Cannabis sativa multi-omics research

• Read: CannSeek? Yes we Can! An open-source single nucleotide polymorphism database and analysis portal for Cannabis sativa

• Watch: Loc’s presentation at the Gigascience Press Seminar Series. 

Learn more about ABLeS on our website, or watch a 10 minute overview of the service. 

Supercomputing access powers paediatric research

Dr Patricia Agudelo-Romero presents a poster at the 2024 AAAI conference (supplied).

Demand for high performance supercomputing resources among life scientists is increasing thanks to consistent growth in both the scale and complexity of omics datasets and analyses. The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) offers a specifically tailored mix of infrastructure and computational resources to support life sciences research, providing an alternative access mechanism to Tier 1 resources outside of onerous merit-based applications. 

The Kids Research Institute Australia, formerly Telethon Kids Institute, is a great example of the support ABLeS provides to research groups. As a word-class paediatric research centre, The Kids is committed to improving children’s health across its 4 key research themes: Indigenous Health, Brain and Behaviour, Chronic and Severe Diseases, and Early Environment. Many of its programs require sophisticated computational biology tools and resources, including the P4 Respiratory Health for Kids team. The P4 team focuses on the significant healthcare burden of childhood respiratory diseases, with around 20% of Australian children developing recurrent respiratory disorders such as wheezing and asthma.

Dr Patricia Agudelo-Romero, Senior Research Fellow, leads the computational biology and bioinformatics arm of the Wal-yan Respiratory Research Centre within The Kids and is a key member of the P4 team. She uses ABLeS resources to conduct omics analyses including epigenetics, transcriptomics and metagenomics. Patricia and the P4 team recently presented two studies enabled by ABLeS - understanding the methylation landscape of in utero programming in relation to asthma risk factors (part of the AERIAL study), and exploring the complexity of the human respiratory virome. The methylation study was a featured poster at the 2024 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology conference, while the lung virome work won best selected talk at the Microbiome Virtual International Forum in 2022, having uncovered a high diversity of bacteriophages in the airways, which may play an important role in modulating the lung ecosystem. 

ABLeS enabled both our studies to process more than 2,300 FASTQ files from targeted high-throughput methylation sequencing and shotgun metagenomics experiments, using two methylation-related nextflow pipelines and one related to virus discovery. These large-scale and computationally demanding analyses would not be possible without cutting-edge resources like our access to the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre provided through ABLeS.

In alignment with the open-science principles of ABLeS, Patricia has made her nextflow pipelines publicly available through the nf-core community - namely the EVEREST for viral assembly and characterisation, and target-methylseq-qc which performs downstream analyses after running a standardised nf-core methylseq pipeline. The same nf-core pipeline is being applied in another project at The Kids Institute, where the Clinical Epigenetics team are analysing whether a mediterranean diet induces DNA methylation changes in pregnant women as part of the ORIGINS study. ABLeS is enabling the team to run the methyl-seq pipeline, including ensuring the pipeline can be run on the upcoming Australian Nextflow Seqera Service.

Could your research team benefit from what ABLeS offers? Watch Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan give an overview of the service.

Latest tech unlocks deep sea mysteries hidden in museum collections

A rare brittle-star from deep-water off New Caledonia. Photo by Caroline Harding/Museums Victoria.

One of the largest distributional and evolutionary DNA datasets seen in marine science has been constructed by researchers from the Museums Victoria Research Institute. They have spent 15 years sequencing deep-sea fauna from museum collections across the globe. Shedding new light on our understanding of deep sea life, the research program seeks to answer questions such as: Where and when did deep sea life begin? How did it spread throughout the oceans that cover over 70% of the Earth’s surface?

The pursuit of big ambitions like mapping patterns of deep-sea biodiversity across the globe creates massive datasets. But these large datasets come with substantial computational requirements, which are not always available. Dr Tim O’Hara, Senior Curator at Museums Victoria, is well aware of this challenge:

“We didn’t have in-house access to the computing infrastructure required to process such large amounts of raw genetic data. We had to find the computing power we needed to process our raw genetic data, create phylogenies (trees of life), and run models that explore evolutionary and biogeographic relationships.”

Tim uses museum collections to answer large-scale questions about the distribution of seafloor animals around the globe, and leads the museum’s brittle-star (ophiuroid) research program. Ophiuroids are widespread on seafloors across the globe, making them an ideal model species to understand distribution patterns across the last 100 million years.

“We extract nuclear and mitochondrial DNA to construct an enormous tree of life, which now contains 2700 samples. This enables us to determine where species originated and spread across the oceans. Since no one has really achieved this before, we are expecting to make a series of novel and interesting discoveries.”

Tim’s team at Melbourne Museum requested support through the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share, or ABLeS. The program was specifically designed to support researchers like Tim, who don’t have local access to the digital infrastructures they need and aren’t regular users of high performance computing facilities. By providing access to appropriate and scalable bioinformatics resources, ABLeS empowers researchers without a background in computational research and who are not currently supported by merit-based allocation schemes to conduct their research
Read more about the technical details of the support ABLeS provides The Ophiuroid Project or read more about Tim’s research.

ABLeS: Enabling Australian researchers to tackle challenges in bioinformatics

Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan presenting the three ABLeS allocation schemes.

The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) has enabled 148 researchers from 26 institutes, organisations and research groups to respond to key bioinformatics challenges since its inception in 2021. Ahead of the upcoming webinar in March that will feature three participants from across Australia, we’ve spotlighted how some Australian life sciences researchers are leveraging ABLeS in their work.

The challenge

Researchers’ ability to leverage molecular analyses is continuously improving, and with this improvement come larger sample sizes, data sizes and computational complexity. This rapid expansion requires resource intensive analyses, plus the development of new, improved and optimised research software, particularly for reference data assets that require significant computational resources to prepare and maintain.

The Australian BioCommons response

The ABLeS program provides access to a mix of infrastructure and computational resources that has been specifically tailored to enable life science research groups to solve these challenges. The team behind ABLeS offers their extensive experience in research software engineering, digital infrastructure and bioinformatics to all participants, in the form of three distinct allocation schemes:

1. Reference data asset generation

Dedicated compute capacity is provided by ABLeS to allow efficient construction of reference data assets that are of enduring value to the research community, and will therefore underpin and enable downstream research. The Bioplatforms Australia Genomics for Australian Plants (GAP) framework initiative accesses this allocation type to advance our understanding of the evolutionary tree of life for flowering Australian plants, and to build complete plant genomes. GAP’s Bioinformatics Lead at the Royal Botanical Gardens of Victoria, Dr Theodore Allnut said:

GAP has produced vast amounts of sequence data that has required storage, processing, and analysis. Access to the supercomputer resources at NCI provided by ABLeS have been essential for GAP work. Overall, 17 botanists and bioinformaticians have processed their data on NCI’s ‘Gadi’ supercomputer and thanks to our ABLeS allocation, GAP has assembled 33 plant reference genomes, constructed the Australian Angiosperm Tree of Life, and undertaken six further species-level evolutionary studies.

2. Production bioinformatics

Research groups are supported to implement and run their existing best practice computational workflow approaches for omics data analysis at a much larger scale than is available through existing in-house computational infrastructure. This approach explains how ABLeS uplifted the research of University of Canberra’s Dr Ambikesh Jayal, Senior Lecturer in Data Science:

My team needed to extend our analysis to the whole Tasmanian Devil genome, which is fairly large (about 3 GB). Running such a large scale analysis was not possible in-house but the excellent and timely support provided by the ABLeS team means we are now running these analyses and plan to publish them in the coming months.

Dr Marie Wong-Erasmus, Principal Bioinformatics Engineer & Data Chair at the Children’s Cancer Institute said:

ABLeS first played a crucial role in creating high-quality and standardised reference datasets for The Zero Childhood Cancer program. Now, we are analysing these datasets using Pawsey infrastructure and we are constantly working to strengthen this partnership as our research program expands.

3. The Software Accelerator

The Software Accelerator supports the further development, installation, optimisation, testing and/or benchmarking of research software and focuses on a culture of software best practice. Bioinformaticians are supported to effectively implement, share, and document their work by embracing the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles. Dr Cali Willet, Senior Research Bioinformatician at Sydney Informatics Hub, The University of Sydney, believes new opportunities have opened up with the ABLeS Software Accelerator:

ABLeS support has allowed us to optimise the highly popular DIA-NN proteomics tool for scalable high throughput analysis on HPC. We have tested and implemented this on NCI’s ‘Gadi’ supercomputer and are excited by the potential for proteomics studies to analyse thousands of samples at once within just one day of computing time.

All ABLeS groups are invited to contribute to, and benefit from, a shared repository of research software, housed by our partners at NCI. Dr Hardip Patel, Bioinformatics Lead in the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at ANU and member of Bioplatforms Australia’s Australian Amphibian and Reptile Genomics (AusARG) Framework Initiative, sees great potential for the repository:

We've created a large-scale software repository for all the genomic resources prepared by AusARG by leveraging NCI resources under the ABLeS framework. We’ve utilised the repository to create analysis workflows, making them easily accessible to all NCI users and building Australia’s ability to initiate significant genomics projects.

Dr Ian Brennan, Postdoctoral Researcher at Australian National University and AusARG, described working with Ziad (BioCommons’ bioinformatics applications specialist) and the team as:

A fantastic, truly cross-disciplinary experience. The input and creativity of the BioCommons team has helped us to make our workflow much more efficient and user friendly, with the bonus of designing it to be lightweight and portable. Importantly, this means the workflow is no longer just a solution that works for our small research group - it can be picked up, used, and modified to suit a much broader community. Overall it has been a really satisfying and genuinely collaborative experience.

To learn more about the ABLeS program and hear directly from researchers involved, register now to attend the upcoming webinar on March 12.

ABLeS is co-funded by Bioplatforms Australia, National Computational Infrastructure and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, and forms part of the national Australian BioCommons infrastructure.

Creative collisions: Bio Day a hit at Supercomputing Asia 2024

This month's Supercomputing Asia (SCA) conference featured a dedicated ‘Bio Day’ which focused on the intersection of biology and computing. Life scientists were enthusiastically invited to interact with the Asia Pacific high performance computing (HPC) community at the Sydney event. The conference organisers offered special access to almost 40 researchers and research infrastructure providers who were keen to participate in the biology-focused sessions. This extra support to add the unique voice of life scientists to the HPC forum was generously provided through Bioplatforms Australia's platinum sponsorship of the event.

Bio Day commenced with Prof Alex Brown, Director - National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, delivering a keynote presentation ‘Towards a National Indigenous genomics Ecosystem within Australia.’ As Professor of Indigenous Genomics at the Telethon Kids Institute and The Australian National University, Alex is an internationally leading Aboriginal clinician/researcher who has worked his entire career in Aboriginal health in the provision of public health services, infectious diseases and chronic disease care, health care policy and research.

Later, sessions titled ‘Building the Foundation: Genomic Data Infrastructure for Precision Medicine and Beyond’ showcased several key pieces of research infrastructure that Australian BioCommons has developed to support life scientists including:

• The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS)

• The Australian Alphafold Service

• The newly funded GUARDIANS project

• A pilot program bringing Seqera Platform to Australian researchers

Some of BioCommons’ significant national partners such as the Australian Amphibian and Reptile Genomics Initiative (AusARG) and international collaborators ELIXIR were also showcased on Bio Day. Additionally, Dr Kate Michie’s (UNSW) talk revealed the ‘Transformative Impact of Deep Learning on Accelerating Molecular Research: A Focus on AlphaFold2 and its Implementation Challenges.’ The Skills and Training Track on the same day also featured our training guru, Dr Melissa Burke, presenting our unique Training Cooperative model.

Sessions held on Bio Day illuminated the unique challenges that bioinformatics research brings to HPC, including:

• Episodic and extended access is required for compute resources

• Compute use is reliant on experimental outcomes, and difficult to predict in advance

• Software is diverse, rapidly evolving, and in many cases not optimised for HPC

• Researchers may have limited experience working in HPC environments

The light shone on these unique challenges stimulated some uncommon conversations at SCA, which aim to improve life science researchers' access to appropriate and scalable bioinformatics methods and compute resources. Dr Johan Gustafsson, Bioinformatics Engagement Officer at BioCommons said:

The conference was a unique opportunity to bring two worlds together - researchers working hard in their particular field of biology don’t normally attend HPC conferences, and vice versa. So it was great to see them starting to speak the same language!

Uwe Winter, BioCloud DevOps Engineer at BioCommons attended a workshop on the recently launched Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC), a group formed to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific research.

Discussions at the TPC workshop brought up a lot of exciting ideas on utilising AI in a fully automated research environment. I was inspired to hear TPC’s future plans and can’t wait to apply them to BioCommons infrastructure for the benefit of Australian researchers!

Overall, Bio Day at SCA was a fantastic chance to continue important conversations around the specialised support and infrastructure that life scientists need. BioCommons extends our thanks to Bioplatforms Australia for their sponsorship and to the conference organisers for running a successful event.

National collaboration advances computing power for bioinformatics

Australian BioCommons has entered into an access agreement with the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre boosting access to high end supercomputing for life science research nationally. The partnership offers life science researchers an unparalleled level of access to high-end supercomputing resources, including 10 million core hours of supercomputing, cloud, GPU, and data services, as well as comprehensive support and help desk assistance.

The agreement between the BioCommons’ lead agent, the University of Melbourne, Pawsey and CSIRO will make Pawsey's state-of-the-art resources more available than ever before to life scientists across the country.

“By providing biologists with flexible access to powerful computing resources, we are breaking down a major barrier to scientific progress. This agreement formalises our longstanding relationship and empowers the bioinformatics community, encouraging bioinformatics researchers to take advantage of high-performance computing resources.”

Dr Sarah Beecroft
Life Science Applications Specialist, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre

Australian BioCommons will directly manage these projects, initially activating access through the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS). Pawsey’s recent HPC technology refresh also offers new impact-focused schemes and additional resources for eligible researchers, offering even greater potential for innovation and impact.