Monash Campus Grid (MCG) Showcase

Monash Sun Grid (MSG)

During the first eight months of 2008, the MSG has provided over 650 thousand CPU hours of HPC computing time to Moansh researchers, a 150-fold increase over the closing eight months of 2006. The MSG is now a major contributor of HPC capacity to Monash research programs of similar magnitude to that provided by external VPAC and NCI (APAC) services. For more information, please see this page.

Climate and meteorology of Earth's polar regions, Prof. Amanda Lynch and Dr Petteri Uotila, School of Geography and Environmental Science. This project currently explores small (less than 2000km across) cyclones over the Southern Ocean, which represents an important element in the global circulations of heat and moisture, and therefore  the maintenance of Southern Hemisphere climate. The primary objectives of this project are to advance the understanding of atmospheric processes responsible for the development and decay of small Southern Ocean cyclones, and to explore the interactions between these cyclones and the underlying surface conditions, including sea ice extent, thickness, concentration, motion and temperature.

Dendritic Polymers, Dr Ravi Prakash Jagadeeshan, Dr Jaroslaw T. Bosko and Tri Pham, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. The great interest in hyperbranched polymers is driven largely by the exciting possibility that their unique architecture can be exploited to produce materials with entirely new properties. In order to explore this, the researchers in this project are developing and implementing Brownian Dynamics Simulation and Molecular Dynamics algorithms using the Monash Sun Grid HPC facility. Understanding of the structure and deformation properties of novel kinds of dendritic polymers and how these relate to their flow properties will enable design and manufacture of novel materials with a wide range of applications from materials science through to medicine.

SPONGE

Currently over 1,000 CPU cores, spanning several faculties, campuses and divisions (including ITS labs) participate in the Monash Green SPONGE. This uses CONDOR software to distribute suitable HPC jobs to soak up idle CPU time on whatever desktop computers are operating from time to time around the Monash network. In the first 8 months of 2008, the Monash Green SPONGE delivered over 250,000 CPU hours (30 CPU years) of compute time to key Monash research programmes without anyone buying any additional hardware, providing an extra 40% over what the central MSG provides. Requiring only staff effort, we aim to increase the participation of faculties to build the biggest distributed compute facility in Australia. For more information, please see this page.

Latin Squares, Dr Ian Wanless and Judith Egan, School of Mathematical Sciences. This project aims to develop the theory on important substructures of 'latin squares'. Latin squares play an important role in pure mathematics and have many applications in the areas of combinatorial design, such as event programme scheduling, statistical experiments and error correcting codes. The research team uses distributed computing, including the Monash Sun Grid, Monash Green SPONGE and Brecca  HPC facilities, as an investigative tool to find patterns which can then be turned into mathematical theorems by humans.

Molecular Replacement, Jason Schmidberger and Dr. Ashley Buckle, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.  One of the major challenges for Protein Crystallographers is to solve the ‘Phase Problem’ for the diffraction data that they collect from their protein crystals, thereby solving their three dimensional structures. A very useful and common method of doing this is Molecular Replacement (MR), where a homologous protein’s structure is used as a ‘starting point’ in the structure determination process.

Brecca

During its first full year of operation at Monash, Brecca had already contributed 700 thousand CPU hours of valuable HPC compute time to Monash and other research programmes. For more information, please see this page.

Bioinformatics in Protein Crystallography, Steve Androulakis and Dr Ashley Buckle, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology This project uses bioinformatics to assist in protein crystal structure determination, by comparing new structures against the entire Protein Data Bank library, which comprises over 70,000 structures. To do this, the research team uses the Nimrod parametric sweep job dispatcher to run CPU-intensive, embarrassingly-parallel molecular replacement operations using the Phaser software tool running on grid HPC resources including Brecca.

Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Cyril Reboul, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology This project uses molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the mechanistic molecular details of GAD, an essential enzyme involved in the production of a major neurotransmitter inhibitor. The research team uses the Brecca HPC to perform the MD simulations which are computationally intensive and can only be run on large scale parallel computer clusters.

East Grid

Ant Colony Optimisation, Dhananjay Thiruvady, Clayton School of Information Technology. This project explores the estimation of distribution algorithms, constraint programming and branch and bound techniques (beam search) for combinatorial optimisation problems. the Monash Sun Grid and the east enterprise grid. By utilising the computational power of Monash's Monash Sun Grid and East Enterprise Grid HPC infrastructure, the researchers involved with this project are able to conduct large numbers of experiments effectively, and with considerable speed.

Nimrod

For a list of projects that utilise Nimrod and the MCG, please see this page.