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The Dennis Moore Oration is the most prestigious forum held by ACS (WA) annually.  

The annual Dennis Moore Oration was inaugurated in honour of Professor Dennis Moore AM, the father-figure of computing in Western Australia. Professor Moore was inaugural chair of the WA Computer Society (which 50+ years later became the ACS of today), the Director of the very first computing centre in WA, an executive director of Government Computing, and then appointed foundation Head of School of Computing at Curtin University of Technology in 1987. 

The Dennis Moore Oration has been hosted by ACS (WA) since 2012 (on the 50th anniversary of the installation of the first computer at UWA in 1962 by Dennis Moore AM) with a range of distinguished speakers on an ICT topic supported by leading edge research, including Professor Andrew Rohl, Professor Ian Reid, Professor Craig Valli, Professor Svetha Venkatesh, Dr Adrian Boeing, Professor Matt Bellgard, Professor Jingbo Wang, Associate Professor Rachel Cardell-Oliver, Associate Professor Doina Olaru and Associate Professor Vidy Potdar. 

This year will be no exception, as we are honoured to have Professor Andreas Wicenec, Professor for Data Intensive Research at The University of Western Australia, present on this year's Oration topic "Astronomical (size) Data Management and Processing in the Era of the Square Kilometre Array".

Abstract: One of the biggest science projects ever, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is being constructed as we speak. The SKA will consist of two radio telescopes, one here in Western Australia and the other one in South Africa. Every day new antennas are being built, tested, shipped and installed on the two sites. Here, in the Murchison Shire, a total of up to 131,072 dipole antennas will be installed, clustered in 512 stations across an area of about 60km in diameter. In South Africa there will be 196 parabolic dishes distributed across an area of 190km in diameter. The science goals for these telescopes are extremely broad and range from observations in our direct vicinity, inside the solar system to studies of the very early universe some 13 billion light-years away. Constructing and operating such delicate scientific instruments in very remote areas is obviously a big challenge, but all of that effort is worth nothing, if we can't analyze and scientifically exploit the data produced by them. Fundamentally, radio antennas are measuring voltages in an extremely high cadence and across many frequency channels and dual polarizations. These measurements are almost immediately digitized and then transferred over fibre links across Wide Area Network links from the observatory sites in South Africa and Western Australia to dedicated High Performance Computing centers in Cape Town and Perth, respectively. The data rates at this stage of the signal chain are truly eye-watering and reach up to several Terabytes per second (TB/s). This data is directly ingested into bespoke, FPGA based correlators, which perform some averaging and calculate the correlation of the signals from each pair of antennas. The correlators reduce the data rates by about a factor of 10, but the resulting data rates are still of the order of 0.5 TB/s. That data is directly consumed by dedicated High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.  This is where the job of the so-called Science Data Processor starts and where the contributions and the expertise of my team and myself are concentrated. Correlated voltage measurements are still quite some ways from something like an image, which typically is the starting point for actual scientific investigations. Getting from those raw inputs to calibrated data products, ready to be analysed by scientists requires compute clusters with several hundred Petaflops (PFLOPs) performance (1 PFLOP is 10**15 floating point operations per second) and is thus far out of reach of any normal installation. This compute capacity has to be available continuously, since the telescopes can observe the whole day long, every day and the whole year. The resulting data products are still massive and tick in at up to 1 Petabyte (PB) for every observation taking between 6 and 12 hours. One PB is the equivalent of 1000 typical laptop storage drives today and thus still far too big to consume on a normal, single computer. In this talk I will present the computational and data management challenges and some of the solutions to maximize the scientific output of the SKA and other large-scale astronomical facilities and outline the limitations and opportunities along the way to support achieving transformational science results and potential Nobel prizes.

The winners of the 1962 Prize and 1962 Medal will also be announced. These prestigious awards, sponsored by Professor Dennis Moore AM, showcase the best and brightest minds in WA and are a celebration of local talent, student excellence and the next generation of ICT Professionals. 

This year, the distinguished Oration event will be held at The UWA Club on Wednesday 16th October, 2024.

Registrations Open from 1800 for Pre-Dinner Drinks at 1815 - 1900 Start

**Dress Code: Formal dress attire**

Background - Dennis Moore Oration

The Oration is named after Dennis Moore, the father-figure of computing in Western Australia.  Professor Moore was first chairman of the WA Computer Society, the Director of the very first computing centre in WA, an executive director of Government Computing, and then appointed foundation Head of School of Computing at Curtin University of Technology in 1987.

ACS 1962 Prize

The prize celebrates the year in which the first digital computer was installed in Western Australia and is sponsored by Dennis Moore FACS. This prestigious prize is annually awarded to an individual Computing/Information Systems student in Western Australia.

ACS 1962 Medal

The medal is named in honour of the year that Western Australia's first internally programmed digital computer was installed by Professor Dennis Moore FACS. This medal is awarded to the most outstanding completed Doctoral research (eg PhD) in Western Australia in the field of Information Technology and Computer Science.

The 2023 Award Winners

          1962 Prize - Shuang Li      

1962 Medal - Dr Manou Rosenberg