New supercomputers for Queensland facility

Quadrupled throughput capacity at the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Foundation (QPSF) is part of an upsurge in high-performance computing resources becoming available to life science-oriented researchers.

But it also highlights a need for greater coordination within the research community to make more efficient use of the rising high-performance resource base, according to some researchers.

The QPSF is adding significantly to that base by taking delivery of two Altix 3000 supercomputer clusters. It is the second phase of a $AUD4 million upgrade to the facility which is funded primarily by the Queensland government and operated by a consortium of six Queensland universities.

The two new systems include the first 64-processor cluster from supercomputer maker SGI to be based on Linux, an open-source variant of the Unix operating system which pervades the academic research environment.

The batch-oriented 64-node cluster, together with a 16-processor system catering to researchers working with more interactive programs, would boost the facility's processing throughput by 400 per cent when they go live around March, according to QPSF acting CEO Ian Atkinson.

Prominent among QPSF's user base are bioinformaticians and computational chemists, including Mark Ragan, head of computational biology and bioinformatics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

He was already using other facilities, notably the Australian National University's Supercomputer Facility (part of the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) "right up to the limit of our allocation," said Ragan. He welcomed the additional processing resources presented by the QPSF upgrade which, broadly speaking, conforms to the same cluster computing architecture as the ANU facility.

However, the rise in processing power at individual facilities was only part of the equation, Ragan said.

The other part involved pressure on bioinformatics researchers to cooperate more effectively on a national basis to leverage the larger resource base.

"The question is whether this (QPSF) facility can be part of an integrated broader approach which could give new capabilities to all bioinformatics in Australia," said Ragan.

"The answer is that it can if we do it right, and that throws the responsibility back in our court."

Informal discussions on the issue were reportedly underway in some research circles, which could result in a coordinated national approach to create more effective matches between researcher needs and the resource base. Among other things, that might permit the evolution of some high-performance facilities into specialised nodes.