New High Performance Computing Facility at JCU Brisbane

If you Google "workstation farming", the first few hits are from an old research paper by Dr. Paul Darwen, a JCU Brisbane lecturer since 2006. 

Workstation farming is an example of grid computing, and makes use of the unused computer that is otherwise wasted at night, quietly connected to parallel processing.

The typical desktop computer is only used for 40 hours per week, and sits idle for the other 128 hours.

The JCU Brisbane campus uses 240 processors, compared to 864 processors utilised at the high performance computing facility at JCU Townsville, which is shared by a much larger number of staff. 

The introduction of workstation farming at the Brisbane campus has allowed for the following tasks to be made possible:

• Master of Information Technology (MIT) data mining students can use this resource for large-scale number-crunching to find patterns in large volumes of data.
   
• MIT computer security students can now use brute-force parallel password checking software to demonstrate how easy it is to get around passwords that are based on words found in a dictionary.

Dr. Paul Darwen conducts research in artificial intelligence and control in problems with noise and incomplete information.  The facility spends a great deal of time running simulations of rainfall and floods, which has implications on insurance, water resources management, and urban planning.  This research builds on his paper "Two levels of Bayesian model averaging for optimal control of stochastic systems" which appeared in the International Journal of Systems Science in July 2011.

For more information on Dr Paul Darwen's research, please email paul.darwen@jcub.edu.au