Personnel

Robert Moritz, Ph.D.
DIRECTOR

In 2005, Dr. Moritz conceptualized a shared proteomics high-performance computing system, organized a consortia of proteomic scientists from all states in Australia, and proposed a computational system specifically for proteomics data analysis for all Australian researchers to access. For this work, in 2006, he was awarded an enabling grant from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council worth AUS$2M. With that award, Dr. Moritz established a Proteomic bioinformatics center in Melbourne that has enabled proteomic researchers anywhere in the country to analyze their mass spectrometry data. This was the first effort anywhere on a national scale to bring proteomic data analysis and algorithms to any researcher in the whole country without the need for them to build their own bioinformatics group. In late 2006, the Australian Proteomics Computational Facility (APCF, www.apcf.edu.au) was inaugurated, and Dr. Moritz remains as Director of the APCF. The dedicated proteomics data analysis facility is equipped with over 1000 CPU-core high-performance computing cluster, and full-time software and system engineers for the continued development of proteomics algorithms and data validation. This facility serves all researchers in Australia and other collaborating centers regardless of their global geographical location.

Jagan Kommineni, Ph.D.
SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Jagan studied the use of HPC systems during his doctoral program at Indian Institute of Technology during early 1990s. Subsequently he has applied his knowledge during his career in the IT Industry over many years and has been extensively involved in web based technologies. Jagan joined Monash University in late 2001 and continued development of Grid/HPC middle-ware for scientific applications until late 2006. Jagans software developments from this work have been deployed over to range of UNIX/Linux flavored operating systems in Australia, UK and USA.

In October 2006, Jagan joined the APCF and was immediately involved in all the stages of building the APCF computational cluster from the ground up, including the racking of the nodes to development of software to control the over 1000 compute cores of the APCF. At the APCF, Jagans work allows the integration of various proteomics applications into a HPC cluster environment based on Linux infrastructure. He has responsible for developing intelligence queuing systems with advanced reservation options through the APCF Meta Scheduler for the current and future needs of the APCF computational facility. He has also added security mechanisms in place and has developed web technologies for the APCF compatible across most of the common web browsers. Jagan maintains the wiki for the APCF user community and he has a special interest and motivation in bringing open source tools into the compute cluster environment

Simon Michnowicz
SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Simon Michnowicz has over 18 years of experience in telecommunications research at Telstra Research Laboratories. He has an M.Eng.Sc from Monash University, and a BE (Hons) and a BSc from Adelaide University. Simon has experience in the development of speech recognition tools and applications. He has closely examined multimodal speech applications (such as speech-enabled web pages) and successfully implemented a multimodal interface to Sensis information, that runs on mobile devices. He was also a senior programmer in the development of Speech Grammar-learning tools that are used to generate large-vocabulary speech grammars. He has also researched the use of biometric security for mobile devices. His interests include localization services, Wireless technologies, embedded technologies and computer security.