The Queensland Government has so far provided $6 million of a promised $10 million which will be used to establish a super computing facility and provide the infrastructure for other universities and industry throughout the state to link to it.
UQ will install an SGI Origin 3000, which will provide the core computing power for the Queensland Parallel Supercomputing Foundation.
Provisions have already been made for it to be upgraded later in the year as expected new technology becomes available.
The foundation is made up of a consortium of six Queensland universities who will use the facility for a range of research.
The Origin 3000 is capable of simulating earth and is likely to be used in research to predict natural disasters as well as to help with drug design, genetics research and molecular modelling.
Because it is capable of creating virtual environments such as coral reefs it is expected to become a major tool in work to tackle problems facing the Great Barrier Reef.
The Origin 3000 is a modular system that can be easily upgraded by simply adding another 'brick' and is capable of harnessing the power of thousands of processors. Each 'brick' contains a variety of components ranging from multiple CPU's to hot-pluggable PCI cards or additional storage or memory.
Once fully operational the new facility will be available to all Queensland universities and private industry based researchers.
