The main driver is the manifested need within the Australian research sector – particularly graduate research students and early career researchers – for open access to comprehensive, high quality, advanced online graduate education. This can be delivered as a collaborative research community endeavour, encompassing contributions from national leading scientists and large national scientific facilities. This driver aligns with Intersect’s strategic plan to widen our traditional services from short skills-based training courses into larger scale collaborative advanced courses for the research community in a way that both assists – and is complementary to – the higher education institutions’ agendas. Furthermore, the initiative coincides with and complements the agenda of Tier 1 HPCD facilities in Australia to efficiently train more skilled HPC users for advanced research and industry workforces in various HPC related domains.
A key element in uplifting this initiative for collaborative graduate education and research community outreach is engaging with and bringing on board numerous strategic stakeholders including national computational facilities; organising committee members; hands-on tutorial experts, teaching professors and so forth to ensure effective operation and successful delivery.
To support HDR students and ECRs
Shorter-form online educational activities