News

QRIScloud expansion to support data-intensive research

 
16/07/2018

Thanks to new investment from its members, and the support of the NCRIS Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) project, QCIF has several capital projects underway.

Over the coming months, these will enhance QRIScloud to further support data-intensive research.

The upgrades include:

  • Increasing bandwidth
    QCIF is increasing QRIScloud’s bandwidth at the Polaris Data Centre, where its storage, compute, and HPC infrastructure are based, to support 100 GB networking. This will enable faster data flows and underpins future expansions to QRIScloud.

  • Supporting an increasing load
    QCIF is scaling the front end of QRIScloud’s primary General Parallel File System (GPFS) cache to better support a separation of workload demand and congestion across services. As a result, high demands on one service, such as computation on HPC systems, will not impact the usability of other services, such as Nextcloud.

  • Adding new compute and volume storage nodes
    QCIF is adding new cloud compute nodes and volume storage nodes into QRIScloud to replace end-of-life equipment. This investment will inject 2,000 vCPUs (virtual central processing units) and 300 TBs of volume storage into QRIScloud and will ensure a continuation of reliable and robust cloud computing services.

  • Improving performance
    QCIF is improving QRIScloud’s performance when accessing data collection storage via HPC clusters by switching from the current Network File System (NFS) mounts over to native General Parallel File System (GPFS) protocols. For QRIScloud users this will enable fast, reliable access to collection storage on HPC systems.

  • Increasing data collection storage capacity
    QCIF is increasing data collection storage capacity by adding additional tape media into the Polaris Data Centre and UQ St Lucia tape libraries. There will be an initial injection of 3 PBs of tape storage, with a further 8 PBs being added incrementally over the next six months.

Other works, which will build on the above, are currently in the planning stages and are slated for introduction later this year.
 
QCIF will endeavour to minimise interruptions to QRIScloud users whilst these changes are being made. We will email users ahead of time about any planned outages.
 
Future issues of QRISnews will announce when projects have been completed.
 
Any queries about the QRIScloud capital works, please contact QCIF Service Delivery Manager Stephen Bird: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..