High Performance & Cloud Computing

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What is this service?

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. Our new HPC facility, Orange, will come online in Q1 2013.

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.

  • McLaren is a shared memory SGI Altix 4700 with 128 Dual-Core CPUs. 1TB RAM and 12 TB disk space. Commissioned in 2008.
    Intersect's new HPC 'Orange' will be operational in early 2013, 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

Intersect will provide the on-going hosting facilities, management and support of HPC systems on behalf of the consortium of NSW universities. A rigorous procurement process was led by the University of Sydney.

Who can access this service?

We welcome researchers and 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.

What tools can I use on this computer?

There is a variety of software pre-installed on this machine. The list can be found on the Intersect Software Index page.

Technical assistance

CSU Security

You will need enhanced security to access this machine. Go to your IAS Login details and select Enhanced access.

Further help

Intersect runs regular HPC courses at CSU campuses (both Introduction to Unix & HPC (HPC for WiMPS), and HPC for Cluey), as well as other eResearch courses.

Please contact Penny for the schedule.

The courses are also advertised through the Research Office’s Professional Development calendar.

Picture of Penny CookeDr Penny Cooke
Telephone: +61 2 6051 9846
Email: pecooke@csu.edu.au
Charles Sturt University

Intersect Call: + 61 2 8079 2534
Intersect Email: hpc_support@intersect.org.au