Welcome to the HPC Unit at James Cook University.  Our current HPC facilities are built around an SGI Altix 350 data server and a cluster of SunFire V20Zs/V40Zs (each with two 2.6 GHz AMD opteron processors and 4GB of memory).  Both these systems were commissioned in mid-2005.  Access to HPC facilities at JCU is restricted to research staff and students - including undergraduate students working on research projects.

In addition to our local HPC resources, JCU is a member of the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Facility (QPSF).  This membership entitles researchers at JCU to request an allocation of time on the QPSF Altix 3700 machines housed at the University of Queensland.   The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) have established a National HPC Facility at the Australian National University (ANU).  APAC have periodic calls for applications from researchers to request CPU time (on merit) to the National Facility.  Further details of the Merit Allocation Scheme are available at the APAC site.

Visualisation Resources

A SUNblade2000 was added to the list of HPC hardware at JCU in 2002 for users who need access to a machine capable of performing 2-D and 3-D visualization tasks.  JCU Access Grid nodes are also available for large (multi-site) video conferencing and for researchers requiring a large screen for visualization of 2-D data.

History of HPC at JCU

Supercomputing came to JCU in 1992 with the arrival of a CRAY EL-92 system.  This system was followed by an IBM RS6000, which was subsequently replaced by an SGI Power Challenge.  A 20 processor SGI Origin system was the successor of the Power Challenge.  In 2002, another 64 processors were added to the SGI Origin.  As stated earlier, our current HPC facilities are built around an SGI Altix 350 (mainly used for storage management) and a cluster of SunFire V20Z/V40Z servers.  There are currently a total of 80 machines that are either a part of the cluster or provide services for the JCU HPC section.

The HPC Unit works closley with the JCU eResearch Centre.

Essential Information

As a potential/current HPC user you should:

• Know our list of Available Software .
• Request/Have a HPC account - see HPC Account Information .
• Read our Policies page(s) - it should contain some useful information.
• Before trying to work on our cluster, please read Using the JCU HPC cluster .
• Be aware of the Available Software for use on your laptop/desktop system.
• Know that Help is avaiable - just submit a request via the request-tracker .  If your problem/request doesn't fit any of the categories in the request-tracker , you can contact-us + .  For more urgent problems (e.g., you believe the cluster is unavailable) you can phone Wayne Mallett (x5084) or Peter Marendy (x6084).
  

If you are interested, you can also find out about how we've got HPC Setup .