Monash Campus Grid (MCG) History

The Monash Sun Grid (MSG) central high performance compute cluster facility was established in 2005, and upgraded annually since.

The Monash Large Research Data Store (LaRDS) was established in 2006, and upgraded annually since.

From 2007 to 2009 the VPAC Brecca cluster operated at Monash.

Major MCG project tasks in 2007 included:

• Reconfigure the central MSG compute facility as a production service.
• Expand the central MSG compute facility, in particular to cater for large memory jobs (10 quad core hi-RAM compute nodes, each with 32GB RAM per node).
• Transition the MCG grid middleware suite into a production service.
• Harvest spare desktop CPU capacity into the MCG (the Monash SPONGE project).
• Relocate the Brecca compute cluster (ex VPAC) to Monash and integrate into the MCG.
• Integrate School of Mathematics Sputnik compute cluster into Brecca and hence the MCG.
• Integrate Faculty of Information Technology compute cluster facilities into the MCG (using NIMROD)