$8m image processing facility to open at Clayton

Monash University is partnering with some of the country's leading technology providers and research institutions to establish an advanced image processing facility that will enable scientists to create, view and analyse high-resolution scientific images and 3D-models previously too large to visualise.

The Multi-modal Australian Sciences Imaging and Visualisation Environment, to be known as MASSIVE, is the first facility of its kind in Australia and will open in August 2010.

It will be funded by the Australian Government through the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), the Victorian Government's Department of Innovation Industry and Regional Development (DIIRD) and the project partners. It will host high-performance computers and graphic technologies to quickly reconstruct and display data-dense 2D, 3D and 3D-plus images from the new-generation instruments in the Clayton precinct and beyond.

Agreements involving all major partners, including Monash University, NCI (hosted by ANU), CSIRO, the Australian Synchrotron, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, and DIIRD, were completed this week.

Monash University e-Research Centre Director Professor Paul Bonnington said the facility would offer researchers from a range of fields, including biomedicine, astronomy, engineering, geoscience and climate studies, unparalleled capacities to construct and view visualisations of the objects of their investigations.

"The size of images produced by detectors in the new generation of Australian imaging instruments is growing at a phenomenal pace. For example, the Australian Synchrotron 'Imaging and Therapies Beamline' will be capable of producing 128GB-volume images, but without this new facility there would be no way to reconstruct or view them at full resolution in an acceptable period of time.

"Large-volume imaging capabilities are central to the scientific enterprise, and for this reason the new facility at the Clayton precinct will greatly boost Australia's ability to process, visualise and understand scientific phenomena," Professor Bonnington said.

"For researchers investigating Alzheimer's disease, for example, the ability to see and analyse high resolution visuals of the cerebral cortex of the brain and its surrounds, will clearly make a huge difference. Doctors studying cancer will be able to look at and analyse visualisations of a tumour in a patient, in close to real-time."

The MASSIVE facility will provide specialist expertise in visualisation, helping researchers to graphically reconstruct experimental data and utilise visualisation tools, including libraries, to analyse and support their inquiries.

Monash University Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Edwina Cornish said MASSIVE would provide cutting-edge capabilities and supporting expertise for the diverse array of research and education activities carried out at Monash, within the Clayton precinct and across Australia.

For more information call Professor Paul Bonnington +61 3 990 20711 or Jane Castles, Media and Communications, on +61 3 9903 4842 or 0417 568 781.