Research Computing Centre

Wiener

  1. Home
  2. Systems
  3. High Performance Computing

Important note

Wiener is a legacy platform and will be shut down later this year (2024). No date has been set for this yet, but RCC will advise Wiener users of the shutdown date well ahead of time. 
 
Due to Wiener's planned shutdown, RCC is no longer creating new Wiener accounts. We encourage you to use HPC Bunya instead. 
 
Please contact the RCC Service Desk if you require more information. 

 

About Wiener 

Wiener, a Dell EMC-manufactured high-performance computer (HPC), is designed to expedite the pace of research in a diverse range of imaging-intensive science, generated by UQ’s world-leading microscopy facilities.       

Wiener will support next-generation molecular biology, neuroscience, and translational research at UQ. 

Specifically, Wiener will support UQ’s new Lattice Light Sheet Microscope (LLSM) to provide high-resolution biological imaging data in real time, allowing image and pattern recognition as well as deconvolution at extreme scale. Deconvolution removes blurriness and other ‘noise’ in images. 

Wiener harnesses the capabilities of the most powerful GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) ever made. Using a mixture of deconvolution algorithms, machine learning and pattern recognition techniques, the supercomputer will provide near real-time outputs of deconvolved, tagged and appropriately characterised data, providing researchers with immediate feedback on the quality of data being collected, allowing faster interpretation of microscopy data. 

Wiener is engineered for very specific use-cases. It is built for applications that:  

  1. use GPU accelerated codes (CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC) 

  1. can function with nVidia GPU accelerators 

  1. are made for imaging-related deconvolution processing and DNN/CNN workflows that leverage (1) and (2) above. 

For CPU-only (central processing unit-only) workloads or high-memory jobs, UQ researchers are advised to use the Bunya HPC.  

Wiener was funded by 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). Researchers from these institutions will have priority in using Wiener.   

Wiener is named after Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who devised an algorithm to remove noise from a signal or image. 
 

Getting a Wiener account 

Whether you are sure, or not sure, Wiener is right for you, please contact the RCC Service Desk and either request a Wiener account or provide the team with more information about the research tasks you would like conducted on an HPC.  
 

Wiener training   

RCC conducts regular 'Introduction to HPC' training for UQ staff and higher-degree research students usually on the last Friday of each month. Please visit RCC's Training webpage for further information. 

For experienced HPC users, RCC will consider holding specialised Wiener training or provide video materials.  

Please contact the RCC Service Desk to register your interest in specialised Wiener training. 
  

Wiener User Guide 

The Wiener User Guide is available on GitHub. 
 

Wiener support 

Users of Wiener should submit support requests to the RCC Service Desk.  
 

Wiener technical specifications 

The Wiener system is built on the 14th Generation Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 platform. This provides a consistent building block for processing datasets across 15 compute and analysis nodes, along with two additional nodes for visualisation. 

The visualisation nodes are comprised of: 

  • 2 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 HPC nodes featuring: 

  • 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 (28 cores per node) 

  • 1 TB DDR4 RAM 

  • 3 x NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerator units 

  • 1.6 TB Dell EMC NVMe Flash Storage 

  • 100 Gbps Mellanox EDR InfiniBand HCA’s 

  • Dell EMC ProSupport Plus: (7x24) Technical Support & Assistance. 

The Compute and Analysis nodes are comprised of: 

  • 17 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R740, featuring: 

  • 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 (28 cores per node) 

  • 384 GB DDR4 RAM 

  • 2 x NVIDIA Tesla V100 Accelerator Unit 

  • 1.6 TB Dell EMC NVMe Flash Storage 

  • 100 Gbps Mellanox EDR InfiniBand HCA’s 

  • Dell EMC ProSupport Plus: (7x24) Technical Support & Assistance. 

The Phase 2.0 nodes are comprised of:  

  • 15 x Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140, featuring:  

  • 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 (28 cores per node) 

  • 384 GB DDR4 RAM 

  • 4 x NVIDIA SXM2 Tesla 32 GB V100 Accelerator Units 

  • 1.6 TB Dell EMC NVMe Flash Storage 

  • 100 Gbps Mellanox EDR InfiniBand HCA’s 

  • Dell EMC ProSupport Plus: (7x24) Technical Support & Assistance. 

Bridging the Dell EMC PowerEdge platform is a low-latency high-bandwidth interconnect of Mellanox EDR SB7800 series InfiniBand switching, which delivers 7.2 TB/s of non-blocking bandwidth across the Wiener system at a 90-nanosecond latency.  

Wiener contains a next-generation 105 GB/second multi-million IOP/s filesystem known as BeeGFS, made to feed data in parallel to the many GPU accelerators with no blocking semantics and minimal I/O wait. 

The new NVIDIA Volta V100 Tensor Cores gives the Wiener system a total processing ‘deep learning’ capacity of 4.284 Petaflops. This accumulated processing power comes from the 204,3800 CUDA cores and 25,600 Tensor cores distributed across the compute and visualisation nodes.