Adelaide ‘Australia’s first 10 gigabit city’

The city now boasts one of the world’s fastest fibre optic networks.

A fibre optic cable.

Hello and welcome to The Download, The Australian’s technology blog for the latest tech news.

David Swan 10am Adelaide ‘Australia’s first 10 gigabit city’

The City of Adelaide has become Australia’s first 10 gigabit city, with 1000 buildings now connected to one of the world’s fastest fibre optic networks.

The project dates back to 2018, when Adelaide partnered with TPG Telecom to install and operate the network and provide high-performance services for the city’s businesses.

“The landmark project – the first of its kind in Australia – represents a significant strategic commitment by the City of Adelaide to provide our city businesses with world-class digital infrastructure that will help create jobs and boost our economy,” Adelaide Lord Mayor Sandy Verschoor said.
“The network is a great asset for local business – as hundreds have already discovered – and is a compelling factor to attract business from interstate or from around the globe.”

TPG Telecom’s general manager for enterprise and government Nick Pachos said the network build involved 82 kilometres of cable, 26,000 spliced fibres, 431 new joints and eight high-density 10G core sites.

He said the project meant Adelaide city businesses can now move into the fast lane.

“Adelaide is now now one of the fastest connected cities in the world, and we delivered this significant construction project on time and on budget,” he said. “What this does is allow businesses to embrace cloud technology or move major large files such as videos, and lab content for example, within Adelaide and globally.

“This is a cheap product, and provides businesses more than enough bandwidth for what they require. This will give them opportunities they may have not otherwise have had.”

He added TPG was talking to other cities about potentially rolling out similar projects elsewhere.

“We’re always looking for these types of opportunities,” he said.

David Swan 9.40am Envato names new CEO

Fast-growing Australian design start-up Envato has named its new CEO, after co-founder Collis Ta-eed announced his departure.

After a search of nearly a year, former HotelsCombined.com CEO Hichame Assi will become Envato’s new chief executive.

“I’m very excited to welcome Hichame to Envato,” Mr Ta’eed said in a statement. “He has an almost founder-like experience of scaling tech businesses of our size and in fact, it turns out he’s been a customer of ours for a number of years!”

He added while there was an Australian focus, the company looked globally to fill the role.

“We were looking for someone who is a digital native, customer-oriented, someone who could lead in a way that’s respectful of our values and purpose as a business but also help us evolve for the next phase of our journey.

“Hichame stood out for his excellent values-alignment, and as someone who also brings with them a globally-minded perspective with experience leading businesses of our scale and complexity.”

“I’ve been working towards this day for some years, and while there will be many things I miss as being CEO, now is the perfect time to step back and let Hichame guide us.”

Mr Assi will step into the top job at the end of October.

“I’m very excited to be leading such a values and purpose-driven team. Envato stood out to me for its’ inspiring people and community-centric approach and I’m hoping to uphold that legacy while helping to scale it globally in this next phase,” he said.

David Swan 9.15am Meet Australia’s newest supercomputer

A new supercomputer is promising to be able to meet the increasing computer needs of Australian researchers, and will power significant research projects, from searching for alien life to COVID-19 research.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre this morning announced it had selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise to deliver its new supercomputer, which will deliver up to 50 petaFLOPs, or 30 times more computer power than its predecessor systems Magnus and Galaxy.

The first phase of the new system will be available by Q3 2021, with full commissioning of the system to occur by the second quarter of 2022. The supercomputers are cooled by a groundwater cooling system specially developed by CSIRO for the supercomputing centre, which is offset by a 118kW solar photovoltaic system.

Mark Stickells, Executive Director at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, said more than 1600 researchers directly use Pawsey’s supercomputers to support computing-intensive research projects, from discovering new galaxies to developing improved diagnostic tests for coronaviruses.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Source: Supplied.

“Supercomputers like those at Pawsey are increasingly crucial to our ability to conduct world-class, high-impact research. The upgrades we’re announcing are a critical move in strengthening Australia’s position in the global research environment and playing a part in major global research projects, from helping in the fight against COVID-19 to working with the precursor telescopes to the Square Kilometre Array. The new supercomputer will not only deliver next generation compute power to meet these growing requirements, it will enable entirely new research projects with global reach and impact,” Mr Stickells said.

Dr Chenoa Tremblay, Postdoctoral Fellow in Dark Magnetism at CSIRO said theagency is using Pawsey’s existing supercomputers to help scan more than ten million stars and analyse hundreds of terabytes of data to search for molecules that provide potential evidence of extraterrestrial life.

“Doing this on my laptop would take 25 years, so having the power of the new supercomputer will help bring our research timelines from years down to days, giving us the power we need to analyse hundreds of thousands of images quickly.”