Prof. David Abramson1, Mr Jake Carroll, Mr Grant Smith, Mr Andrew Beattie
1University Of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
Biography:
David is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the University of Queensland. Between 2013 and 2024 he was the Director of the University of Queensland Research Computing Centre.
He has held appointments at Griffith University, CSIRO, RMIT and Monash University.
Prior to joining UQ, he was the Director of the Monash e-Education Centre, Science Director of the Monash e-Research Centre, and a Professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash.
From 2007 to 2011 he was an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow.
David has expertise in High Performance Computing, distributed and parallel computing, computer architecture and software engineering.
He has produced in excess of 230 research publications, and some of his work has also been integrated in commercial products. One of these, Nimrod, has been used widely in research and academia globally, and is also available as a commercial product, called EnFuzion, from Axceleon.
Abstract:
The IBM UQ Centre of Excellence is a unique collaboration between IBM and the Research Computing Centre at the University of Queensland. It aims to develop industry solutions and impact across a wide range of applications, including health, environment and manufacturing. It draws on IBM technologies and expertise and leverages UQ’s excellence in both computing and research. The Centre expands IBMs network of government and industry partners, and delivers industry scale technical solutions in research computing, while providing leading edge technologies to UQ.
Formed in 2020, the Centre has deployed novel platforms at UQ and has applied them to research from life sciences to the humanities. These platforms have benefited UQ through the early adoption of technologies improving time-to-outcome. Importantly, such early testing and adoption has also identified opportunities for product improvement, which have been fed back to IBM. In many cases feature enhancements have been integrated into products, and difficult edge cases and errors have been exercised and enhanced.
Specific examples of IBM’s technology include the application of IBM Storage Scale™ in UQ’s award winning MeDiCI data storage fabric, a multi-vendor platform that stores research data at scale. The partnership led to the development, testing and validation of AMD’s Instinct Series GPU accelerator for the WatsonX/AI platform with cutting edge Large Language Models (LLMs) – a world first in GPU agnostic AI deployments. In cloud-native storage, the partnership’s shared infrastructure allowed the testing, validation and verification of the IBM block Container Storage Interface on next generation Flashsystem™ storage devices.