HPC Servers

These machines are located at UQ and consist of:

• A 200+ cpu core cluster consisting of SUN hardware with AMD Barcelona CPU and 8 GB per node
• 3x SGI Altix 3700/3700BXs series systems

These provide a large shared memory capability.

In addition to the central QCIF facility at UQ the various QCIF partners have extensive HPC resources. QCIF is working towards the integration and virtualisation of these resources and the development of user portal and remote access facilities.

Storage

QCIF facilitates access to a secure mass storage system based on SGI-DMF Hierachical Storage Management software.

Dual SGI servers provide fault tolerant front end access while tape libraries at two sites (St Lucia and Ipswich) hold duplicate data copies.

Currently offering over 1.3PB of tape capacity and 70TB of cache disk the system can expa

Collaboration

QCIF is moving to develop infrastructure and resources to support a move to grid computing infrastructure. Because of the geographic spread of Queensland, collaboration between the QCIF partners is a complex issue. QCIF has moved to overcome these difficulties by supporting the establishment of access grids at each of the partner University locations. Access Grid nodes are in operation at UQ, JCU, Griffith, USQ, CQU and QUT.

QCIF has contributed to the development of VisLab; an Access Grid development lab. The Access Grid comprises:

• 2 Dell HD projectors (1920 x 1200 pixels): total projected area: 3840 x 1200 pixels
• internet ports for laptops
• adjustable lighting
• high-speed connection

VisLab provides access to a rich IT and user interface development lab. It has a number of tiled computer displays with its Linux-based Access Grid available for development.