The uptake of the latest upgrade of The University of Queensland’s supercomputer was evident from the day the systems were released to researchers in July 2026.
In the almost four months since the release of Phase 4.0 of HPC Bunya, resources have been fully utilised with the CPU partition at about 90%, and the new GPUs are being used at around 92% utilisation.
RCC Director Jake Carroll said: “This is a key metric for the health of these significant facilities. It means that demand is significant for these new resources and that users are efficiently and successfully scheduling constantly and at scale to the new cutting-edge technologies."
Given the full utilisation, the RCC team has been tweaking the job scheduler with the aim of minimising wait times for the majority of users. This has kept wait times to a low level for many researchers.
“The result is that people are not queuing for these resources for too long and there is sufficient headroom to ‘burst’ with more workload, and when users need to run, there is almost always enough resource to allow for it. This is how an efficient supercomputer works in action," said Jake.
Comments from the research community have been encouraging and highly supportive of Bunya’s direction, aligning around the increased memory per GPU (288 GB of HBM3e per GPU), enabling more efficient work in very large reinforcement learning (RL) training workloads.
Many users have commented that the systems are a significant leap, even from UQ’s previous largest GPU technology, the AMD MI300x.
All UQ researchers with a Bunya account can use Phase 4.0.
Bunya Phase 4.0 consists of more than 3,000 AMD Turin CPUs and three sets of AMD Instinct MI355x GPUs, representing the forefront of generative AI and accelerated supercomputing systems currently available worldwide.
The upgraded system is also advanced in its thermal efficiency and cooling technology. The DLC (Direct Liquid to Chip) cooling efficiency brings more than just a cooler data centre and a more sustainable energy footprint; it also brings performance and consistency of operation that is not possible using air cooling-based technologies at this scale.
The new systems spent several weeks in pre-production testing before being released to all Bunya users.
Bunya’s next upgrade has been ordered and is currently expected at the end of this year.
