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:
Current Systems
| OVERVIEW | |
|---|---|---|
| Commissioning Date | Initial installation - January 2018 Additional upgrade occurred in October 2018 Additional upgrade occurred in December 2019 | |
| COMPUTE NODES | ||
| 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 | |
Isaac Newton Cluster (Decommissioned)
 | OVERVIEW | |
|---|---|---|
| Commissioning Date | 21st of November 2012 | |
| COMPUTE NODES | ||
| 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 | |
Decommissioned Systems
Einstein Cluster (Decommissioned)
 | OVERVIEW | |
|---|---|---|
| Commisioning Date | November 2007 | |
| Decommisioning Date | 16th of November 2012 | |
| COMPUTE NODES | ||
| 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 | ||
Colony Cluster (Decommissioned)
| OVERVIEW | |
|---|---|---|
| Commisioning Date | Early 2002 | |
| Decommisioning Date | 21st December 2007 | |
| COMPUTE NODES | ||
| 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 | |
