UQ marked the fifth anniversary of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation with a showcase event on Tuesday, 10 March.
The celebration began with a panel of UQ and IBM staff discussing the partnership, what has been accomplished over the last five years, and how it has been achieved.
Craig McKenna (Vice-President, IBM Storage Sales—Asia-Pacific) hosted the panel, and the panelists included Andrew Beattie (IBM Senior Storage Technical Specialist), Grant Smith (IBM Storage Sales Australia/NZ), current UQ RCC Director Jake Carroll and his predecessor Prof. David Abramson, who is currently an Emeritus Professor in UQ’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
RCC Director Jake Carroll, part of the IBM@UQ Centre since its inception in 2020, said: “I've been able to watch it grow from an idea into something so impactful.”
“The IBM@UQ partnership has turned into a wonderful example of what a focused, motivated and passionate group of people can do together when they care about the delivery of outcomes for research. We have created something special here that I am proud to be a contributor to,” said Jake.
Since launching in 2020, the IBM@UQ partnership has achieved the following:
- The creation of a globally significant proof of concept environment and research infrastructure testbed in the form of the IBM Fusion HCI platform, designed to test workloads, enable new methods in infrastructure provisioning, and proof-of-concept sandboxes with clients and partners. It is the only site in the world to have IBM Power, x86, three different GPU technologies (AMD, NVIDIA and Intel) and ARM systems under one cohesive container-driven opinionated* infrastructure "roof".
- Delivery of the world's first AMD GPU container operator, developed between UQ and IBM's SPEED initiative, enabling AMD GPU operators in OpenShift.
- Delivery of the Storage Scale CSI Driver, enabling IBM's parallel filesystem provider to exist natively inside container infrastructure.
"For researchers, this provides a rare opportunity to experiment, explore and suggest new shapes of engagement with their digital research infrastructure. It is a place to co-develop and co-design, testing out new ways to build and deploy services and workflows” Jake said.
The UQ and IBM partnership aims to support researchers working across a wide range of disciplines, including, but not limited to, health, life-sciences, manufacturing and environmental sciences, and helps researchers address the challenges associated with extreme data growth, data organisation and data storage.
The support to researchers includes the provision of innovative platforms to help accelerate research being conducted at UQ.
See our website for more information about the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation.
And read some of our previous articles about the UQ and IBM partnership:
- IBM partnership brings latest hardware to UQ for research, 31 May 2020
- New IBM storage system should be a "game changer" for UQ, 20 December 2023
* RCC Director Jake Carroll’s explanation of “opinionated infrastructure”: Opinionated infrastructure is an approach to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and system design where the tooling or platform enforces a specific, "golden path" for configuring, deploying, and managing resources. Instead of offering total flexibility, it provides pre-configured, best-practice solutions that prioritise speed, consistency, and reduced decision-making, often at the cost of customisability – but gives ultimate assurance and stability.
The RCC and IBM panelists at the showcase event.
