Information Technology Services

QBI's Information Technology group has a tradition of designing, engineering and implementing cutting edge storage, high performance computing and infrastructure innovations to further the industry and cope with the significant demands of research.

QBI's Information Technology services group provides comprehensive support services for desktop, server and high performance computing infrastructure. The group supports around 500 Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and Linux/UNIX end user laptops, desktops and workstations. QBI IT provides access to multiple high-performance computing facilities including a dense 1600 core HPC installation with 8TB of globally shared memory and 400TB of directly attached storage Infiniband. The group also manages a specialised GPU-computing and deep learning facility custom designed for high throughput microscopy processing and artificial intelligence workloads.

QBI-IT provide backline infrastructure support for many critical components of scientific equipment, including highly specialised workstations packed with solid state disk, high end graphics processing units and high resolution visualisation systems.

The group manage a world-class large-scale archival storage facility, consisting of an ultra high performance flash/SSD storage tier, about 3PB of high performance near line disk and a peta-scale geographically distributed tape silo arrangement.

Networking in QBI consists of gigabit (1GbE) to every desktop and end user device, with 10GbE switching for every floor and specialised fileserver. This is augmented by a 40GbE ethernet network for the UQ-RCC/QBI MeDiCI nodes collaboration, assisted by UQ University Networks for high speed research data movement. For next generation and emergent low latency, high throughput workloads, QBI offers a specialised 100GbE Intel Omnipath fabric for compute applications.

QBI works closely in industrial engagement with the respective vendors of the specialised computing equipment employed in the building, constantly looking for newer, faster and more efficient ways to aid and enhance the services provided to enable research.

QBI-IT is currently staffed by 5 individuals, each with a specialised background in different aspects of computer science. The group is managed by the Information Technology Manager, Perry Kollmorgen. The staff members wide ranging capabilities extend from basic desktop support services, through to infrastructure engineering, software development and high performance computing specialisation.