High Performance Computing
What is HPC and why should I use it?
Many researchers use computers but desktop machines only go so far. If your overnight compute jobs run into the next day, if your research waits for a weekend to run, if your computer is limiting the progress of your research, then high performance computing (HPC) is the solution.
High performance computing is used to solve real-world problems of significant scale or detail across a diverse range of disciplines including physics, biology, chemistry, geosciences, climate sciences, engineering and many others.
Intersect encourages researchers who are interested in using HPC to contact us for advice and support at hpc_support@intersect.org.au
Intersect’s HPC facilities
Intersect has a partner share in the peak facilities at the National Computational Infrastructure, based at the Australian National University. In addition to this, Intersect also manages a state facility, Orange hosted at IC2 in Sydney.
The two differ:
- Intersect's new HPC 'Orange' will be operational in early 2013. The SGI 30+ Tflop distributed memory cluster will provide a greater than 25-fold increase of compute power and a fivefold increase of disk capacity on the existing system. The new system features 100 cluster nodes with 1600 cores powered by the Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processor series. It also includes 200 TB local scratch disk space, 101TB of usable shared storage delivering 25TFlops, more details here
- At NCI: Vayu is a Sun Constellation Cluster with 1492 nodes, each containing 2 quad core Nehalem processors summing up to 11,936 cores. 37TB RAM and 800 TB disk space. Commissioned in 2010.
NCI's new peak system will be fully operational in early 2013, more details here.
Attribution Policy
If you use resources on McLaren or Vayu/NCI via the Intersect partner share we ask that you acknowledge us. The proposed text is:
Computational (and/or storage) resources used in this work were provided by Intersect Australia Ltd.
The full policy can be found here: http://www.intersect.org.au/attribution-policy
HPC Resource Allocation
Intersect runs an annual resource allocation in October for allocations lasting 12 months and starting the following January. Current allocations can be viewed here.
Applications can be made at https://nf.nci.org.au/accounts/projects_new/APP_form.php
Please select "Intersect" as partner/share
Please note:
- allocations have been made for the entire 2013 period (an application makes one request for each machine for each quarter in 2013)
- all applications to Intersect's HPC systems will be made through NCI's forms
- all applications must be made by academic staff at an Intersect member institution. We welcome PhD students to make use of the facilities, but require that the lead CI on an application be an academic staff member.
- we now allow multiple requests to be made by applicants. This is to facilitate a PhD student and their supervisors both having separate projects on the facility.
If you have questions, contact our HPC support at hpc_support@intersect.org.au, or your institution’s eResearch Analyst.
Help
HPC support is available by emailing: hpc_support@intersect.org.au or calling (02) 8079 2534.