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US students turn up heat on e-research

2 August 2006

From left: University of California, San Diego, students Ms Celia Croy, Ms Iwen Wu, Mr Noah Ollikainen and Ms Angelina Altshuler are participating in an e-research program at Monash's Faculty of IT.

Four students from the University of California, San Diego, have swapped their summer break for a Melbourne winter to participate in a highly sought-after e-research program at Monash's Faculty of IT.

Funded through the US National Science Foundation, the students have taken up the opportunity to enhance and extend their studies using the Nimrod computing grid, developed at Monash University.

Ms Celia Croy, a biology major, said although the students could have pursued their studies at home, the trip to Australia had given them the chance to meet the grid's creators and enjoy a cultural experience at the same time.

"Our school wants us to be well-rounded individuals when we graduate," said Ms Croy, who is using computational chemistry calculations to develop a more accurate tool for drug design.

Bioinformatics major Mr Noah Ollikainen, who uses models such as the one Ms Croy is working on to test and identify potential drug candidates, said he wanted to travel abroad before he graduated. "This was the perfect opportunity to do that and do research at the same time," he said.

Ms Angelina Altshuler, who along with fellow student Ms Iwen Wu is using the software to help develop early computer simulations of the human heart, said they had come to Monash to learn about how the grid could be used for their projects.

"We're all doing projects in biological fields, and it's a new thing to be using the computer technology with biology," she said.

Program coordinator, Nimrod creator and e-research pioneer at Monash, Professor David Abramson, said the program was a classic example of e-research at work, where supercomputer technology was applied to a specific area of research and research teams were linked throughout the world.

"It's bringing Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) together with whatever the research domain happens to be and doing things that you couldn't do before," he said. "Here we have biology and computer science being done globally -- that's e-research."

Professor Abramson said he hoped the program, facilitated with applications and infrastructure research interest group PRAGMA (Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly) and now in its third year, would continue.

"It has already forged long-term international links and collaborations, and it's the students who underpin it," he said.