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 or T: 02 8079 2534.

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, McLaren hosted in Sydney.

The two differ: McLaren is a large-scale shared memory system while NCI’s Vayu is a distributed memory system. McLaren is better suited to certain classes of research applications, where access to large amounts of memory is a key performance requirement. The system is allocated flexibly to support a wider base of users including those just starting out with HPC or from smaller institutions.

  • 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.
  • McLaren is a shared memory SGI Altix 4700 with 128 Dual-Core CPUs. 1TB RAM and 12 TB disk space. Commissioned in 2008.