Research Computing Resources at UNSW
We strongly advise you to look at the list of UNSW Research Technology Services, including Katana, available to UNSW researchers.
Similar information is available at Research Infrastructure → High-Performance Computing.
Cluster Computing at CSE
Several clusters of Linux computers are available at CSE for special purposes.
The computer support group (CSG) manages several of these clusters and each cluster computer works much like a CSE login server.
They originate from different funding purposes related to the research groups that use them.
Access to cluster computers is given by CSG at the request of the supervising academic
If you want to use a cluster computer, please ask the supervising academic to request this for you.
| Cluster name | Supervising academic | Resources |
|---|---|---|
| Rattle, Sigmod | Xuemin Lin | 25 Linux computers |
| VLDB | Ying Zhang | 10 Linux Nodes plus a Linux fileserver with many cores |
General Notes
Research cluster computers managed by CSG are generally used by one person at a time, though CSG don't enforce this.
Making sure two people aren't using the same cluster machine is something we leave up to the research group to schedule.
Similarly, we set up cluster computers to not restrict the memory use on the processes running there.
The person using the computer will need to manage the memory use of their processes to avoid their computing task crashing.
If you want to start jobs, then disconnect from the remote session and reconnect later there are programs to help you do this.
See our notes on screen and VNC.
Faculty Clusters
The Leonardi Engineering Research HPC Cluster was decommissioned in December 2017.
There is some information about an Engineering Faculty compute-cluster that we suspect is very out-of-date. (at Sept. 2019)