RCC shuts down HPC Wiener

13 December 2024

University of Queensland high-performance computer Wiener was decommissioned  on Friday, 29 November 2024 as it had reached its end of life.

RCC advised Wiener users early on about the shutdown and encouraged them to apply for access to UQ HPC Bunya and move their data and workflows from Wiener well in advance of 29 November.

RCC Director Jake Carroll said Wiener had served UQ and the broader research community “tirelessly” since early 2018.

“Wiener was one of the very first GPU supercomputing capabilities in Australia and paved the way for many great things to come, including the Bunya supercomputer,” said Jake.

"Bunya is well placed to support UQ and its partners, with cutting-edge GPU and CPU technologies available. These technologies are many times more capable than Wiener, offering better performance, time to result, and power efficiency for each calculation run. UQ will continue to invest in Bunya on a yearly basis to maintain this cutting-edge capability.

“From the UQ RCC team, we thank the many hundreds of users of the Wiener supercomputer for their collaboration, inputs and suggestions that made Wiener UQ’s first truly co-designed digital research infrastructure and led us to Bunya.”

From 29 November, users are no longer able to log into Wiener, Inode2 or Visnode1. They also no longer have access to their data in /home or /scratch on Wiener. The RCC Infrastructure Team advised users early on that RCC will not move or backup their data in Wiener.

UQ staff or students experiencing issues as a result of Wiener’s shutdown are advised to contact the RCC Service Deskrcc-support@uq.edu.au.

Those having trouble using Bunya for the first time are also advised to contact the RCC Service Desk. New Bunya users are encouraged to attend RCC’s regular Bunya-focused “Introduction to HPC” workshop.

RCC’s major upgrade of Bunya — named Bunya Phase 3.0, which went live on 23 September 2024 — has delivered even higher performance for the supercomputer, with a focus on multi-GPU training, large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (Gen-AI). The upgrades have also brought a significant array of new visual computing capabilities, and has ushered in a new era of using direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology to more efficiently cool supercomputer components.

Bunya Phase 3.0 provides UQ researchers with access to one of the most powerful supercomputing platforms in the Group of Eight (Go8) universities.

Read more about Bunya Phase 3.0.

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