High Performance Computing
Overview
The Research Computing Centre manages central High Performance Computing resources at UQ.
Central HPC facilities at UQ currently comprise the Tinaroo, FlashLite, Awoonga and Wiener clusters.
HPC Accounts
UQ staff and research students are entitled to free HPC accounts but need to apply.
To open an HPC account for research, UQ staff and students should do the following:
- Register for a QRIScloud account if they do not already have one (register at QRIScloud). Registration for Tinaroo, FlashLite and Awoonga is through QRIScloud.
- Request a cluster-specific service, i.e. Tinaroo, FlashLite, Awoonga or Wiener. (See the Tinaroo, FlashLite, Awoonga and Wiener webpages for further information about getting an account.)
If you're unsure which cluster you should apply for, apply for Awoonga in the first instance.
Once your account has been created, your access details for HPC will be confirmed via email.
For any other support requests, please contact the RCC Support Desk: rcc-support@uq.edu.au.
Training
UQ staff and research students may want to attend a training session to familiarise themselves with UQ's HPC environment. Training is provided monthly, and researchers are welcome to consult with the RCC’s HPC staff about their projects — just email: rcc-support@uq.edu.au.
Advanced Computing Strategy
In 2013, the Research Computing Centre developed a strategy of broadening the infrastructure base for supporting computational research at UQ. This strategy is built on the belief that it is more cost effective to partition the application space into niches and serve these by different machines. These are:
- Very large tightly coupled parallel jobs that support NCG funded research
- Tightly coupled parallel jobs that support emergent research or require local infrastructure
- Large memory and high input-output (IO) jobs
- Loosely-coupled high throughput jobs
- Accelerated computing platforms.
Very large tightly coupled parallel jobs that support NCG funded research
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) best serves these jobs. NCI operates a 60,000 core peak system called Raijin, a Fujitsu Primergy cluster, that entered production in June 2013.
UQ is currently guaranteed 8M core hours per year, through a dedicated LIEF grant, and approximately 2M from a dedicated QCIF allocation, in addition to anything gained from national merit allocation. These cycles are allocated by RCC and QCIF.
Tightly coupled parallel jobs that support emergent research or require local infrastructure
Tinaroo serves these jobs. Tinaroo, introduced at UQ in April 2016, supports smaller parallel jobs than are executed on NCI, and also serves a more dynamic workload. Access mechanisms are optimised for rapid account creation, which serves post graduate and early career researchers well. It is coupled to a significant data holding on campus.
Very large memory and very high input-output (IO) jobs
In 2015, RCC launched a data intensive computer called FlashLite. FlashLite is funded by ARC LIEF, with significant investment from QCIF, UQ and other Australian universities. FlashLite supports applications that need very high performance secondary memory as well as large amounts of primary (main) memory, and optimises data movement within the machine. FlashLite is ideal for data intensive applications that are neither well served by traditional supercomputers nor by modern cloud-based data centres.
UQ has a minimum allocation of some 3.5M core hours per year. Importantly, FlashLite serves a new and emerging domain currently not supported in Australia.
Loosely-coupled high throughput jobs
Awoonga and the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (Nectar) research cloud are ideal platforms for running loosely coupled jobs.
QCIF operates the Queensland node of the national research cloud provided by the Nectar virtual machines project. The Queensland node is called QRIScloud, and its main data centre is located at the Dell Data Centre in Springfield, Brisbane.
RCC and QCIF built Awoonga to augment HPCs Tinaroo and FlashLite. Awoonga is an HPC optimised for high-throughput work with serial or modest parallel computations.
Accelerated computing platforms
Wiener is specifically for imaging-intensive science, generated by UQ’s world-leading microscopy facilities. It provides near real-time outputs of deconvolved, tagged and appropriately characterised imaging data. Wiener, launched in early 2018, will support UQ’s new world-class IMB-based Lattice Light Sheet Microscope.
Wiener was developed with strategic funding from UQ and a consortium of the university’s various cutting-edge microscopy facilities housed within the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis (CMM), Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), and Queensland Brain Institute (QBI).