Dr Nick Tate is Director of the Australian Government's Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project which is based at the University of Queensland (UQ). He is also both Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and Chair of the ACS Queensland branch. RDSI is a $50m project funded under the Super Science initiative which is transforming the storage of research data throughout Australian Universities and Research Institutions, through the implementation of a multi-petabyte storage cloud. He is an Adjunct Professor in IT and Electrical Engineering at UQ, has presented widely on both Cloud Computing and Big Data and has written extensively in the Australian Newspaper and elsewhere on these topics.

He is also Founder and Co-Chair of the eResearch Australasia conference and was Chair of the World Computer Congress in 2010. Prior to UQ, Nick worked on the development of anti-missile missile systems for Royal Navy Warships and on real-time air traffic control systems, before spending twenty years working for investment banks, eighteen years in London and then two years with Macquarie Bank in Sydney. He was Head of IT for the United Bank of Kuwait in London during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf war when there was a run on the bank and the overnight abolition of the Kuwaiti Dinar which was the bank’s main currency of account.

Nick holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, a Master's degree in Computer Science and a PhD in IT security. He is also a Chartered Engineer, an ACS Certified Professional (CP), a Chartered IT Professional, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Fellow of the ACS. He has over 40 years IT experience with 16 years at CIO level in a University and two banks. He also has 14 years experience as a company director.

Presentation: Building a massive research data cloud in Australia – Lessons learned and reflection on an African context

Over the last four years, the storage of Research Data in Australia has been transformed through the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project. RDSI has partnered with regional eResearch Service providers to establish a massive research data store across Australia which currently holds 13 Petabytes of accessible data for collaborative use by researchers and it is expected to grow to over 50 Petabytes by the middle of 2015. This presentation will explore how it is benefiting researchers, review lessons learned during the project and reflect on how this might translate into an African context. It will include the role of public and private clouds, legal and other considerations for access as well as the infrastructure and tools necessary to achieve a useful outcome.