A University of Queensland professor has called new supercomputer Bunya a “game changer.”
Another UQ researcher said Bunya has more than halved the timeframe of his computations.
Professor Megan O’Mara, a Senior Group Leader at UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN), was unsure about the computational resources available at UQ when she moved her research group to the University last year. She was pleasantly surprised with Bunya’s capabilities.
“Bunya has been a game changer for my group!” said Megan. “It’s provided access to state-of-the-art GPU facilities we need for our research, massively increasing the computational resources available at UQ.”
Megan’s research group uses computational techniques to design drugs for the treatment of chronic pain, and to understand how proteins in the cell membrane transport chemotherapies out of cancer cells. “We do this to understand how certain cancers become resistant to chemotherapies,” said Megan.
RCC Chief Technology Officer Jake Carroll said Megan and her group are good advocates for Bunya as they have established strong baselines for what good performance should look like in a supercomputer, for their specific research.
“They are also excellent community members who work with the RCC team to improve services for everyone that uses Bunya,” said Jake.
Associate Professor Loic Yengo, Group Leader of the Statistical Genomics Laboratory within UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), uses Bunya to analyse large genomic data sets and identify variants in humans and other species. He then develops statistical methods and software tools based on his research.
“I write my own code to run these analyses, and therefore need to leverage, as much as possible, the hardware architecture of the [Bunya] cluster.
“I managed to run analyses on Bunya within less than 48 hours, which would have taken me five days on many other platforms. I achieved this remarkable performance using only one core.
“Moreover, the queueing system on Bunya allows me to rapidly transition from experimenting on small prototypes to scaling my calculations to thousands of jobs."
Jake said it is great to see UQ researchers already deriving benefits from Bunya, launched last December.
“One of the greatest satisfactions of this role is that we get to witness the creativity and innovation of our researchers using the infrastructure RCC builds for them,” said Jake.
