NEWS
campusreview.com.au
Gender gaps, not gender grants
ARC highlights efforts to fund
more equality in research but
offers reminder its awards
aren’t marked his and hers.
T
he Australian Research Council has
reiterated that its grants aren’t based
on gender.
In 2016, the ARC plans to implement
a range of measures to close research’s
gender gap. This includes improving gender
balance on grant selection committees,
investigating options for unconscious bias
training and ensuring there is appropriate
support for all researchers – regardless
of gender – who wish to return to the
workforce after a career break. There have
also been several initiatives the body has
implemented this year to help.
But each time the ARC has a major round
of grants, chief executive professor Aidan
Byrne said, it’s necessary to reinforce the
message that funding isn’t based on gender.
“Each year for the last few years, we’ve
published at the same time the gender
curves associated with those major grants,”
3000-year shortcut
Image: Thinkstock
Supercomputers cut calculation
time by nearly three millennia
for aircraft engineer.
A
researcher will use supercomputers
to power through almost 3000 years
worth of calculations in 12 months.
Professor Richard Sandberg, a University
of Melbourne aircraft engine expert,
has secured the use of Swiss and US
supercomputers to do the calculations
needed to complete his research. In
collaboration with General Electric,
Sandberg is examining the effects
turbulence has on aircraft engine efficiency.
He hopes this will help create greener and
cleaner methods of air travel.
On a normal desktop or laptop with four
cores, however, the calculations required
for this research would take 100 million
Byrne explained. “We have a program
that we call our Relative Opportunity
Performance Evaluation, (ROPE). We hope
that all of our assessors pay particular
attention to the potential breaks in their
careers researchers may have had and
try to take that into account when they’re
assessing and providing assessment
information to us.”
Byrne acknowledged a gender gap exists
but argued progress was being made.
“In September, the Science in Australia
Gender Equity (SAGE) pilot was launched,”
he said. “This partnership between the
Australian Academy of Science and
the Australian Academy of Technological
Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) is the
first Australian trial of the UK Athena SWAN
gender equity accreditation program.”
SAGE offers bronze, silver and gold
accreditation to research institutions that
successfully close the gender gap. Since
2011, UK institutions require a silver award
to receive research funds. Australian
SAGE accreditations are not yet linked
to ARC grants. ■
core-hours. This equals 2854 years. The
supercomputers can do this in a year.
He said many future research projects
would also use these machines.
“Traditionally, when you write code and
you have large systems to solve, you have
to wait for a while and you can’t go through
as many problems,” Sandberg explained.
“For example, if you have to wait, let’s say,
a week or two weeks for calculations to
finish, and you can speed that up by just
using a much bigger computer … you speed
up any kind of process.”
Sandberg’s 100 million core-hours equates
to almost half of the processing power of
Australia’s major computing facilities.
“We’re going to use very, very large
supercomputers – so by running our
simulations on thousands and thousands
of computer cores at the same time, we
can do what you otherwise would need
3000 years for on a regular PC, in one year,”
Sandberg told Campus Review.
“Those are going to be some of the
world’s biggest super computers. We’re
going to use ]ۋ