Griffith HPC Computing Resource

The High Performance Computing environment consists of high-end systems used for executing complex number crunching applications for research. Griffith users have access to the following systems:

Awoonga cluster

QRIScloud Special Offering

Gowonda cluster (deprecated)

Microsoft Azure cloud

National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

Awoonga Cluster

Griffith has partnered with QCIF which operates the Awoonga HTC cluster (1000 cores). Griffith users can request an account on Awoonga cluster using this link to create an account on the awoonga cluster. Please click the link "Register to use Awoonga”. The number of cores available to a single job is limited to 24 on one node. It is not possible to create an MPI job using multiple nodes. Hence all mpi jobs should be limited to 24 cores on a single node. It is a Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) system having a maximum of 24 cores per node and sharing the same memory and is managed by one operating system. The home directory and software directory is shared across all nodes.

Ref: https://www.qriscloud.org.au/support/qriscloud-documentation/92-awoonga-user-guide

In general, you have a question or problem regarding Awoonga, please raise a new QRIScloud support request by emailing support@qriscloud.org.au. For further support options, please visit https://www.qriscloud.org.au/support.

QRIScloud Special Offering

QRIScloud offers special nodes to Griffith users.

To request a special node, please follow this link and select "Use specialised compute"

In general, you have a question or problem regarding special nodes on QRIScloud, please raise a new QRIScloud support request by emailing support@qriscloud.org.au. For further support options, please visithttps://www.qriscloud.org.au/support.

Flashlite node

This is a large memory cluster named Flashlite (large memory and fast disks in a non-virtualized environment). FlashLite is a research computer that has been designed and optimised for data intensive computing. FlashLite will support applications that need large amounts of primary memory along with very high performance secondary memory. Each of the 68 nodes of FlashLite is equipped with 512 Gbytes of main memory and 4.8TB of solid-state drive (SSD). The operating software supports various programming paradigms including message passing (MPI), shared memory (OpenMP), and virtual symmetric multiprocessor (vSMP). The vSMP mode aggregates nodes to produce virtual machines with very large "main" memory address space.

Large memory node

QRIScloud operates a small number of compute nodes that can accommodate instances with up to 1TB memory. These can be made available in blocks of time of two weeks as instances with up to 60 vCPUs and 900Gb of memory. Instances can be provisioned with large storage volumes to hold working data.

GPU node

QRIScloud operates a small number of compute nodes that contain a Tesla K20m GPU. These can be made available in blocks of time of two weeks as instances. Instances can be provisioned with storage volumes to hold working data.

Elastic compute

Normal Nectar resources are often in short supply, leading to problems with launching instances. QRIScloud has set aside some limited capacity to allow users to create instances with large numbers of vCPUs with a relatively short (up to 7 days) lifetime (elastic compute).

QCIF's share of NCI

QCIF has a share in time on Raijin and is accepting applications all year round. To request QCIF's share of NCI, follow this link and select "Apply for QCIF's NCI share "

Gowonda cluster (deprecated)

The gowonda cluster is being deprecated. However, if you need to use licensed software that is not available on awoonga and /QRIScloud (e.g gaussian, comsol, etc) or need to run mpi jobs spanning multiple nodes, you may request an account on this cluster. In general, if you have any support related issues on this cluster, you may open a ticket by following this link.

Microsoft Azure cloud

This is work in progress. As soon as it is available, we will announce it here.

National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) provides researchers with access to Australia’s major national computational facilities, including Raijin. The main call for applications is made annually in October for allocations to start the following January for up to 12 months.

Australia’s national research computing service, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), provides world-class, high-end services to Australia’s researchers, the primary objectives of which are to raise the ambition, impact, and outcomes of Australian research through access to advanced, computational and data-intensive methods, support, and high-performance infrastructure.

NCI's peak system,Raijin, is a Fujitsu Primergy high-performance, distributed-memory cluster which entered production use in June 2013. It comprises more than 50,000 cores (Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge technology, 2.6 GHz), 160 TBytes of main memory, Infiniband FDR interconnect and 10 PBytes of usable fast filesystem (for short-term scratch space).The unit of shared memory parallelism is the node, which comprises dual 8-core Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge 2.6 GHz) processors, i.e., 16 cores. The memory specification across the nodes is heterogeneous in order to provide a configuration capable of accommodating the requirements of most applications, and providing also for large-memory jobs. Raijin is particular suited to large scale MPI jobs which use less than 2GB per core and require low latency interconnects.

Ref: https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/Getting+Started+at+NCI