Mr Greg D’Arcy1
1Aarnet, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Greg D’Arcy is the Head Digital Research, Life Sciences at AARNet. With over twenty years working in the research and education sectors, Greg’s background lies in managing complex digital transformation and infrastructure initiatives. Greg’s experience ranges across policy development, managing sensitive data, digital repositories and content distribution networks (CDN), data analytics, service design, stakeholder engagement, and strategic planning.
Panelist:
- Dr Kyle Chard (Globus/Uni of Chicago)
- Blair Bethwaite (REANNZ, NZ)
- Dr Marlies Hankel (University of Queensland)
- Gin Tan (Monash University)
Dr Marlies Hankel has a master in mathematics and a PhD in computational chemistry. She moved to The University of Queensland in 2004 and has held positions in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and School of Mathematics as a senior research fellow and lecturer. Her research was in energy storage materials, and she taught numerical methods. She built her first high performance computing cluster in 2004 and has built 4 clusters over the years. She enjoys teaching and helping others and finally moved full time to the Research Computing Centre (RCC) in 2021. Her role in RCC is skills training and support of users and the development of operational procedures.
Gin Tan is the Associate Director of Monash eResearch. She began her career in both enterprise and research computing, eventually finding her true passion in high-performance computing (HPC).Over the past eight years at Monash University, Gin has been instrumental in the development and deployment of a new HPC cluster, and has since grown into a technical leadership role. She enjoys diving deep into the technical aspects of her work while also excelling at translating complex needs into practical, effective solutions.
Kyle Chard is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. He co-leads the Globus Labs research group, which focuses on a broad range of research problems in data-intensive computing and research data management.
Blair Bethwaite is NeSI’s Solutions Manager. When not on a bike, squash court, or in the ocean, he specialises in innovation of the underlying systems and platforms to enable NeSI’s teams to deliver greater value to researchers. He has almost 20 years of experience in distributed computing; both in research and for research; for institutional and national projects; from science application collaborations, through grid & cloud middleware development, to full HPC & cloud system infrastructure design, implementation, and operations.
Abstract:
As research becomes increasingly data-intensive and collaborative, the ability to move and share data reliably, securely and at scale is fundamental to realising an integrated national research infrastructure (NRI) ecosystem. This panel session will explore how robust data mobility underpins collaboration and innovation across universities, scientific facilities and industry.
A key focus will be on the role of advanced tools and platforms — particularly Globus.org — in enabling secure, high-performance data pipelines. Widely adopted across the research community in the US, Globus provides a trusted solution for automating and managing data transfers across institutional and geographic boundaries, simplifying the movement of large datasets between instruments, storage systems and computing environments.
The BoF will highlight opportunities for deeper integration across infrastructure layers and sectors, as panellists share views on the policy and governance requirements necessary to support federated data access and supporting cross-sector interoperability. The panel will discuss how secure and efficient data mobility capabilities strengthen research agility, protects data assets and maximises the impact of other national research investments. The session will showcase how tools like Globus are critical in facilitating scalable scientific workflows involving distributed national facilities and cloud or HPC resources.
This session is ideal for infrastructure providers, researchers, and policymakers seeking to understand and shape the future of an integrated NRI ecosystem. Participants are encouraged to bring their questions, ideas and experiences to help build this emerging community of practice across the research sector.