UQ Research Computing Centre

RCC staffers Jake Carroll and Sarah Walters attended / in Japan earlier this year. Read their reports about industry trends and their experience at the landmark event for the Asia-Pacific supercomputing community.

https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2026/04/rcc-scahpcasia-2026-convergence-constraints-and-future-research-computing

RCC at SCA/HPCAsia 2026: Convergence, constraints and the future of research computing Two RCC staffers attended SupercomputingAsia (SCA) and HPCAsia 2026, held in Osaka, Japan from 26–29 January, alongside more than 2,500 participants from academia, industry and government.

We will take over operational responsibility for the Queensland Node of the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar Research Cloud from QCIF Digital Research from 1 July 2026.

This transition is building on UQ and RCC's extensive experience in delivering national research services and QCIF Digital Research's successful stewardship of the Queensland node since its inception.

https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2026/05/queensland-nectar-node-transition-uq

Queensland Nectar Node transition to UQ The University of Queensland's Research Computing Centre (RCC) will take over operational responsibility for the Queensland Node of the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Nectar Research Cloud from QCIF Digital Research from 1 July 2026.

RCC has deployed a new feature on its XNAT advanced imaging platform to make it easier for researchers to use their data with the latest research software and integrated analysis pipelines.

The new Australian Imaging Service (AIS) capability allows researchers to launch Jupyter Notebooks and the Neurodesk platform directly from their project on the UQ AIS XNAT platform, with access to their imaging data.

RCC Senior Principal Software Engineer/Developer Dr Mark Endrei said: “The Neurodesk Notebook provides researchers with a virtual desktop and an extensive suite of biomedical imaging tools with support for GPU acceleration.”

Aswin Narayanan, National Imaging Facility (NIF) Senior Imaging Informatics Fellow at UQ, said: “This integration brings UQ’s large repository of imaging data backed by XNAT and UQ Research Data Manager (UQRDM) together with hundreds of analysis tools and software into a single environment, removing the need to install software and transfer data.

“We’re excited to be the first node in the national AIS and NIF network to launch this integration,” said Aswin.

RCC is keen to hear from UQ XNAT users interested in piloting this new feature.

https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2026/04/new-feature-launch-neurodesk-xnat

New feature to launch Neurodesk from XNAT RCC has deployed a new feature on its XNAT advanced imaging platform to make it easier for researchers to use their data with the latest research software and integrated analysis pipelines.

A recent upgrade to The University of Queensland’s supercomputer will see better flexibility and faster results for researchers, especially for AI workloads.

The environment of UQ HPC Bunya has been modernised with the installation of Rocky Linux 9 (Rocky 9), a premier, stable and free enterprise-grade operating system (OS) for HPCs that is heavily used in modern cluster deployments.

RCC Senior Principal Scientific Frameworks Officer Oliver Cairncross said in recent production tests following the installation of Rocky 9, RCC’s team achieved a sustained throughput of approximately 4,500 tokens* per second using a single high-end GPU on Bunya.

“This allowed us to process complex structured classification tasks across 7,500 documents in under 45 minutes. This type of workload was previously inefficient or technically impossible to run at this scale,” said Oliver.



Read more:

Rocky 9 upgrade makes UQ HPC faster and more flexible A recent upgrade to The University of Queensland’s supercomputer will see better flexibility and faster results for researchers, especially for AI workloads.

Our newsletter is out now! Articles on:
* Rocky 9 upgrade makes UQ HPC faster and more flexible
* New feature to launch Neurodesk from XNAT
* RCC staffer honoured in global women in HPC list
* RCC reports from SCA/HPCAsia 2026
* UQ celebrates 5 years of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation
* RCC Director joins AeRO Executive Committee
* “Mr REDCap” Simon Forsyth retires.

RCC News April 2026 Rocky 9 upgrade makes UQ HPC faster and more flexible; New feature to launch Neurodesk from XNAT; RCC staffer honoured in global women in HPC list; RCC reports from SCA/HPCAsia 2026; UQ celebrates 5 years of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation; RCC Director joins AeRO Exec' Committee; “...

We're incredibly proud of RCC Research Systems Projects and Delivery Manager Sarah Walters being featured as part of SC26's Women’s History Month.

See her SC profile below, and read our article as follows to see what Sarah's nominee wrote about her, and what Sarah and RCC Director Jake Carroll said about the honour.
https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2026/04/rcc-staffer-honoured-global-women-hpc-list

Posters from university students and early-career researchers are being solicited for the Belfast-based ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2026).

Thanks to the generous support of SIGHPC and SIGARCH, ICS 2026 is pleased to offer both student travel grants and early-career researcher (ECR) travel grants.

ICS 2026 is also organising an optional conference mentorship program, which participants may select during registration.

Applications for all of the above (just the abstract submission for the poster) are due by 15 April 2026, with acceptance notifications sent by 30 April 2026.

ICS 2026 serves as a leading international forum for presenting research results in high-performance computing systems.

The conference will be held from 6­–9 July 2026 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the 40th edition of the event.

RCC Senior Principal Software Engineer/Developer Dr Mark Endrei is on the Organising Committee for ICS 2026 as the Asia-Pacific Publicity Chair.

More info: https://rcc.uq.edu.au/article/2026/03/ics-2026-student-and-ecr%C2%A0poster-submissions-and-travel-grants

ICS 2026 student and ECR poster submissions and travel grants Posters from university students and early-career researchers are being solicited for the Northern Ireland-based ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2026).

Today at we celebrated 5 years of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation.

A panel at the event discussed the UQ/IBM partnership, what has been accomplished over the last 5 years and how it has been achieved. Craig McKenna (Vice-President, IBM Storage Sales—Asia-Pacific) hosted the panel, and the panelists included Andrew Beattie (IBM Senior Storage Technical Specialist), Grant Smith (IBM Storage Sales Australia/NZ), current UQ RCC Director Jake Carroll and his predecessor Prof. David Abramson.

See our website for more information about the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation: https://rcc.uq.edu.au/partners/ibmuq-centre-excellence-and-innovation

(Photos by RCC Research Systems Projects and Delivery Manager Sarah Walters.)

Dr Joshua Fryman, Intel Fellow and Director of Intel Government Technology’s R&D Group, will present a seminar at The University of Queensland on Monday, 2 March, 9:30-10:30am, with morning tea to follow.

During Dr Fryman's talk, concrete examples of novel hardware R&D programs related to memory technology, and software R&D related to performance optimisations, will be shown to motivate different ways to think about doing R&D.

Please register:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/next-generation-system-integration-and-rd-for-sustaining-ai-and-hpc-growth-tickets-1983424005593?aff=oddtdtcreator

Next-Generation System Integration and R&D for Sustaining AI and HPC Growth Please join us for this UQ RCC seminar with Intel's Dr Joshua Fryman. A complementary morning tea will be served after the seminar.

RCC's Jake Carroll and Sarah Walters attended Supercomputing Asia 2026 / HPC Asia 2026 in Osaka, Japan last week.

Jake was part of the "Managing and sharing large scientific data sets" Birds of a Feather panel: https://sites.google.com/view/data-storage-filesystems-bof/

Jake also spoke at the co-located IBM Storage Scale User Group meeting, pictured below. (Photos: audience photo by Takafumi Sasaki; other photos by Sarah Walters.)