Delivering HPC Bioinformatics to Queensland

The University of Queensland (UQ), already a major high-performance computing (HPC) site and a member of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), will benefit from installation of three SGI Ultra Violet 10 (UV 10) systems with the new Intel Nehalem EX processors as part of its high-performance computing upgrade.  Dr David Green, from UQ’s Information Technology Services division, said each UV 10 will be configured with 32 cores and 128GB but expandable to 512GB of memory.  UQ Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Max Lu said key research areas such as bioinformatics, engineering such as computational fluid dynamics, and some image-processing demanded high-performance, big-memory computing capacity.  “These computers will strengthen an important part of the University’s research capacity. Tasks such as processing enormous amounts of biological information generated through techniques such as genome-sequencing, microarrays and imaging cannot be done on standard desktop computers.” Professor Lu said.