The History of CQU’s HPC Facilities

In early 2002, CQUniversity had a small compute farm funded by a local faculty for computational research applications. In 2006, CQU and QUT, with contributing funds from QPSF (Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation – now known as QCIF), successfully partnered to win a national competitive “Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities (LIEF)” Grant. This grant enabled both QUT and CQU to upgrade its High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. With this funding CQUniversity purchased and commissioned a significant SGI HPC System in 2007, which was affectionately known as the “Einstein HPC cluster”. This system provided significant compute and storage facilities to all CQUniversity academics, researchers and research students, until it was decommissioned in November 2012.

In 2012, CQUniversity successfully applied to the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) to supply matching fund of $200,000 for the “Upgrade of HPC facilities project”. Funds of $200,000 from the Office of Research and the Information Technology Directorate ($100,000 each) and QCIF matching funds lead to the purchase of CQUniversity third generation HPC facilities, in which was known as the Isaac Newton HPC Cluster.

In December 2017 and January 2018, CQUniversity conducted an upgrade to its HPC facility and whilst not a complete replacement, many of the core components including storage and compute was replaced. This fourth generation HPC facility is known as the Marie Curie HPC Cluster and like the previous HPC systems, this facility is available to all Central Queensland University academics, researchers and research students. This system has been designed to support future growth in advanced computing utilisation. The newest HPC system at CQ University allows significant computing capabilities that provides access to large CPU, memory and/or data storage resources. Additionally, the HPC facilities utilizes a “Job Scheduler”, thus allowing users to submit a significant number of jobs to be processed. The CQUniversity HPC facility provides researchers access to unprecedented local research computing infrastructure.

The table below provides details of current and previous CQUniversity’s HPC Systems:

	COMPUTE NODES
	OVERVIEW
	Commissioning Date	Initial installation – January 2018 Additional upgrade occurred in October 2018 Additional upgrade occurred in December 2019
	Number of Compute Nodes	20
	CPU Sockets	40
	Cores	528
	GPU	4
	Total Memory	7.296 TB
	Theoretical Performance	63.65 Tflops
	SHARED STORAGE
	Disk Capacity	320TB Raw
	OTHER
	Max Power(Not including old nodes)	TBD

	COMPUTE NODES
	OVERVIEW
	Commissioning Date	21st of November 2012
	Number of Compute Nodes	31
	CPU Sockets	64
	Cores	544
	GPU	2
	Total Memory	4.35TB
	Disk	62TB Raw
	Theoretical Performance	12.35 Tflops
	SHARED STORAGE
	Disk Capacity	240TB Raw
	OTHER
	Max Power	21 KW

	COMPUTE NODES
	OVERVIEW
	Commisioning Date	November 2007
	Decommisioning Date	16th of November 2012
	Number of Compute Nodes	20
	CPU Sockets	40
	Cores	160
	GPU	None
	Total Memory	320GB
	Disk	10TB Raw
	Theoretical Performance	~1.16 Tflops
	SHARED STORAGE
	Disk Capacity	6 TB Raw
	OTHER
	Max Power

	COMPUTE NODES
	OVERVIEW
	Commisioning Date	Early 2002
	Decommisioning Date	21st December 2007
	Number of Compute Nodes	84
	CPU Sockets	84
	Cores	84
	Total Memory	42GB
	Disk	1.38TB
	Theoretical Performance	84 GFlops (or 0.084 TFlops)
	SHARED STORAGE
	Disk Capacity	138GB Raw
	OTHER
	Max Power	Unknown

The History of CQU’s HPC Facilities

Current Systems

Marie Curie Cluster

Isaac Newton Cluster (Decommissioned)

Decommissioned Systems

Einstein Cluster (Decommissioned)

Colony Cluster (Decommissioned)