External Facilities - State and National

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Researchers at QUT are able to access state and national facilities (see below) provided by the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF - previously known as QPSF) and the National Facility.

Please contact the HPC and Research Support Group for assistance in using these facilities.

Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation facilities (QCIF)

QUT is a member institution of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF).

The Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), formerly known as the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation (QPSF), is a consortium of Queensland universities formed with the objective to increase the State's innovative capacity through deployment and exploitation of advanced computing and communications infrastructure - supercomputers, high-capacity data archives, visualisation and networking capability.

One of QCIF 's main objectives is to provide a multi-institutional state-wide Grid computing facility based on the same paradigm as the global Computational Grid, namely - large scale resource sharing.

For QUT researchers, our membership of QCIF means that you have access to the entire range of QCIF facilities, services and expertise at any of the member universities.

Below is a brief list of some of the QCIF facilities available to QUT researchers:

University of Queensland

• SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 - 64 x Intel Itanium 2 (1500 Mhz) and 120 GByte memory (Cyclone)
• SGI Altix 3700 - 16 x Intel Itanium 2 (1500 Mhz) and 120 GByte memory (Storm)
• SGI Altix 3700 - 16 x Intel Itanium 2 (1500 Mhz) and 30 GByte memory (Gust)
• 100 Tbyte mass storage facility
• AccessGrid Node

James Cook University

• A Sun Microsystems SunFire V20Zs/V40Zs cluster (each with two 2.6 GHz AMD Opteron processors and 4 GByte of memory)
• A Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 2000
• 3 x AccessGrid Nodes

Griffith University

• Sun Microsystems V20z
• 2 x AccessGrid Nodes

Central Queensland University

• 2 x Compaq Proliant ML370G2 servers (each with 2 x Pentium III 1266 XEON and 1.5 GByte RAM)
• Compaq Deskpro EN SFF cluster (84 x 1 GHz Pentium III with 512 MByte RAM)
• 4 x AccessGrid Nodes

University of Southern Queensland

• 2 x Sun Microsystems Sun Fire 280R servers (1.2 GHz UltraSPARC III)
• AccessGrid Node

The National Facility

Researchers at QUT may also access the resources of the National Facility located at ANU, Canberra.

The National Facility is the leading computational platform in Australia, centred around an SGI Altix 3700 BX2 supercomputer, with over 1900 processors (Itanium2 - 1.6 GHz), 5.6 TBytes total memory, over 100 TBytes of storage and a peak theoretical performance exceeding 12 Teraflops. A number of other systems are also available.

QUT staff and postgraduate students and researchers are not charged for the use of this system unless they are working on commercial ventures.

For details contact Dr. Joseph Young - phone: (07) 3138 1218 or email: j.young@qut.edu.au

HPC Support Services

QUT staff and students who are using any of the QCIF or National Facility machines can contact QUT's HPC and Research Support Group (HPC) for support and assistance.