The Brumby Government is investing $1.45 million toward a $3 million High Performance Computing Facility at the Australian Synchrotron in Clayton. Innovation Minister Gavin Jennings told eResearch Australasia 2008 Conference that the funding will take medical imaging in Victoria to the next level. “Our $1.45 million investment will be used to develop the high-performance computing facility to support imaging beamlines at the Synchrotron along with funding from the Australian Synchrotron, the CSIRO, Monash University and the Victorian Partnership for Advance Computing (VPAC),” Mr Jennings said. “This facility will equip the Australian Synchrotron with the specialist capabilities required to analyse beamline experiments, allowing rapid interrogation, analysis and visualisation of the data being generated directly at the beamlines. “With this facility, the Australian Synchrotron will be a leader for imaging beamlines, establishing one of only two beamlines world-wide equipped with the capability to reconstruct high-resolution 3D phase contrast images while experiments are in progress. “It will provide scientists with the capacity to undertake immediate analysis of experiments, determining whether the results are meaningful or need to be reworked. “The performance of experiments at the Australian Synchrotron will be enhanced by this facility and is predicted to improve scientists’ productivity by 25 per cent. “This new state-of-the-art facility will keep Australian scientists at the forefront of x-ray imaging development, attract the best scientists to Victoria and provide a unique platform for accelerating scientific discovery.” The Australian Synchrotron will be the largest scientific user facility in the southern hemisphere by the end of 2009. It is already accelerating groundbreaking Victorian biotechnology research and this new facility will speed up development of new drugs for cancer, cardiovascular and neurological disease and diabetes. The High Performance Computing Facility project is part of the Brumby Government’s ongoing commitment to eResearch and is supported by our recently announced $300 million Innovation Statement, Innovation: Victoria’s Future. The Brumby Government’s investment in this project builds on our $50 million commitment to build a $100 million Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative to support researchers from the Parkville Precinct, Monash University and other Victorian research institutes. Through these iconic projects and the injection of more than $1 billion into Victoria’s innovation program through Innovation: Victoria’s Future, the Brumby Government is building on the state’s leadership in innovation.