RMIT is the first Australian University to go live with a dedicated cloud supercomputing facility, opening access to cloud supercomputing at scale, and giving RMIT researchers the power to significantly accelerate research outcomes.

Built together with Amazon Web Services (AWS), The Data Foundry, and AARNet (Australia's Academic and Research Network), this milestone means that researchers can now access even greater computing power to address the world’s most complex challenges in far less time.

The RMIT AWS Cloud Supercomputing Hub, also known as RACE, will drive transformational research by enabling access to powerful computing infrastructure and very fast connectivity, with future speeds of up to 400Gbps.

By combining the latest network technologies from AARNet with the industry leading high-performance computing capabilities of AWS the RACE Hub will significantly enhance RMIT’s collaborative research and innovation capability.

AARNet, Australia’s national research and education network, is providing the high-speed connectivity between RMIT and AWS. To deliver the required scalability to 400Gbps, AARNet has built new diverse fibre paths from the AARNet backbone to RMIT.

These new paths provide RMIT with network infrastructure for the RACE Hub project, as well as for the benefit of the university more broadly. The paths provide increased network resilience and the ability to upgrade the campus’s network connectivity to 100Gbps services and beyond in the future.

AARNet has provisioned connectivity to AWS in the form of two 2Gbps AWS Direct Connect services, delivered via diverse AARNet fibre and backbone paths. This bandwidth can be scaled by RMIT up through 100Gbps to 400Gbps based on the utilisation of RACE and can be provided direct to the AWS Sydney zone or to the new AWS Melbourne zone as required. AARNet engineers are also assisting RMIT with the design of the internal network infrastructure for RACE to enable the seamless and scalable AWS Direct Connect services over AARNet.

Potential research areas that are set to benefit from RACE include advanced manufacturing, computational chemistry, space, fintech, digital health, creative technologies and more.