University of Queensland: Wiener

ABOUT WIENER

Wiener, a Dell EMC-manufactured high-performance computer (HPC), is designed to expedite the pace of research in a diverse range of imaging-intensive science, generated by UQ’s world-leading microscopy facilities.     

Wiener will support next-generation molecular biology, neuroscience and translational research at UQ.

Specifically, Wiener will support UQ’s new Lattice Light Sheet Microscope (LLSM) to provide high-resolution biological imaging data in real time, allowing image and pattern recognition as well as deconvolution at extreme scale. Deconvolution removes blurriness and other ‘noise’ in images.

Wiener harnesses the capabilities of the most powerful GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) ever made. Using a mixture of deconvolution algorithms, machine learning and pattern recognition techniques, the supercomputer will provide near real-time outputs of deconvolved, tagged and appropriately characterised data, providing researchers with immediate feedback on the quality of data being collected, allowing faster interpretation of microscopy data.

Wiener is engineered for very specific use-cases. It is built for applications that;

• Use GPU accelerated codes (CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC);

• Can function with nVidia GPU accelerators;

• Are made for imaging-related deconvolution processing and DNN/CNN workflows that leverage (1) and (2) above.

For CPU-only (central processing unit-only) workloads or high-memory jobs, UQ researchers are advised to use the Awoonga, Tinaroo or FlashLite HPCs. The latter is specifically for data-intensive workloads.

Wiener was funded by strategic funding from UQ and a consortium of the university’s various cutting-edge microscopy facilities housed within the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis (CMM), Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), and Queensland Brain Institute (QBI).

Wiener is named after Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who devised an algorithm to remove noise from a signal or image.

Read more about Wiener here.