Bunya is a UQ funded HPC facility for UQ researchers and operated by UQ staff.
UQ has funded Phase 1-3 of Bunya with contributions to Phase 1 from QCIF and the Institute for Molecular Biosciences. Individual research groups have made contributions to Bunya.
[!IMPORTANT] No researchers or groups have exclusive or special access to Bunya resources, such as partitions, queues, or compute nodes.
Researchers from UQ and QCIF member institutions can apply for access to Bunya.
Access to Bunya will only be given for research. Any researcher from an eligible institution can apply for access to Bunya if they have a research project that needs HPC resources. This includes access for master, honours, and project/thesis students with a research project and research supervisor.
Access will not be given for teaching, including undergraduate courses, or workshops. Workshops might be permitted if they are research training and participants are existing Bunya users.
[!IMPORTANT] There are no allocations for users or groups on Bunya.
Bunya operates under a fair share model. Bunya does not operate under a merit system. Please see here for information on fair share.
Fair share operates on a user basis. Accounting groups or their size do not affect a user’s fair share. Users in the same accounting group are not able to take/give fair share from/to another user in the same accounting group.
Users and groups are not able to apply for immediate access to resources or for a larger share of resources due to deadlines or merit.
Bunya uses historical usage to determine whose job to run next (i.e. fair share). If a user has not used Bunya recently (i.e. they have low usage), they will have a higher priority and more of their jobs will start. If you have used Bunya a lot recently (ie your usage is high), then your priority will be lowered to give other users a chance to run.
If you use Bunya to run lots of jobs continuously, you will have higher usage, and during times when the machine is busy, the number of jobs that can be run will decrease. i.e., you may be able to run lots of jobs during the quiet times, but you will see your running jobs decrease during the busy times.
Groups, schools, and institutes, etc. are able to contribute to Bunya. The contribution can be of any size and does not need to be large enough to fund a certain piece of hardware.
Contributions do not buy exclusive, or immediate, access.
UQ users who are associated with a contribution to Bunya are moved under a separate funding group. Under the new funding group, each user has an equal share of the contribution added to their fair share, effectively increasing each user’s fair share. This results in a higher priority for their jobs over those without a contribution to Bunya.