Facilities
Our high performance computing (HPC) facilities are located at the University of Queensland (UQ) and are available to Queensland universities when their computational requirements exceed the capability of local HPC units. We recently tendered for a replacement of our UQ-based HPC equipment which will include a bioinformatics joint facility. This new facility will have at least 3,000 processor cores with approximate speed rated at 5.7 Tera Flops and 11,520 Gigabytes of memory. Furthermore, it will include a large research-specific storage management system. Currently, our storage system initially stores data to disc on the latest SGI CXFS Storage Area Network at St Lucia before moving it progressively out to tape through a pair of Sun SL8500 tape robots with 740 TeraBytes capacity. The tape store is mirrored at the Ipswich campus and all data is replicated across both sites as a fail-safe.
National Facilities
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is located at the Australian National University Supercomputing Facility (ANUSF) and is utilised by member organisations requiring intensive computational capability. QCIF provides the conduit for Queensland researchers to access this facility. The facility provides a 12,000 core processor system with 512 TeraBytes of memory with a processing capability of 140 TeraFlops.
Distributed Facilities
As a distributed entity QCIF supports the distributed HPC facilities across the member universities. In 2009 we invested in:
- A new high performance computational facility at the University of Southern Queensland
- OptIPortal and minor hardware upgrade at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
In 2010 we expect to be funding upgrades of facilities at Griffi th University, QUT and James Cook University as the existing hardware has reached its end of life. We are also working towards the integration and virtualisation of these resources as well as the development of user portals and remote access facilities.
The QCIF facilities are available for use by researchers and students (through their supervisors) from within the QCIF partner institutions.
The QCIF Merit Allocation Scheme has been established to allow researchers access to the QCIF HPC facilities, located at UQ based on merit. A substantial proportion of the QCIF HPC computational resources are available for distribution under this Scheme by the QCIF CEO Advisory Committee.
For ViSAC Lab Clients
Information for clients of the ViSAC visualisation and advanced computing laboratory, including information for students and for lecturers and presenters.
Matlab installation instructions for researchers on the UQ network (licenses were funded by QCIF) .