M3
High GPU demand on M3 has driven up wait times across the cluster. To keep access fair for everyone, we are actively monitoring GPU utilisation and will cancel jobs that reserve GPUs but leave them idle. Please refer to this page for information on how to use M3 resources effectively.
We will be updating our Unity file system at Wednesday 16/Sep starting at 12:00. Unity is used to support the /home,/apps,/mnt/reference file systems on M3.
Impact should be relatively minimal:
- I/O may hang for 60 seconds or so when each NAS server fails over from one Storage Processor to another, which should happen 2-3 times.
- Performance may be degraded while all NAS servers run on the same SP. Performance should become nominal once all NAS servers fail back over to their original SP by the end of the upgrade
Description:
We are rolling out upgrades to our Lustre clients across all nodes. We have reservations for 16th,17th,18th Sept which will be used to roll out the changes. You may note longer scheduling times due to this.
Cryosparc servers will be down during the upgrade.
We will be also be upgrading the Slurm controller on Wednesday, 23 Sept 2026 9AM-12PM. A reservation is in place to stop any jobs being scheduled during this time, which will affect the scheduling of long running jobs. Besides upgrading the Slurm server, we will be archiving over a decade of Slurm job results. From this point on, only 3 years worth of job data will be stored.
For any queries or concerns, please contact the HPC team at: hpc@monash.edu
Welcome to the M3 user documentation
You can explore all of our pages in the left sidebar. If you don't see this sidebar, click on the the triple bar ≡ in the top-left to reveal the sidebar.
What is M3?
M3 is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster (formerly known as MASSIVE). M3 allows researchers to process large amounts of complex data by parallelising their workloads across many computers. Since 2010, MASSIVE has played a key role in driving discoveries across many disciplines including biomedical sciences, materials research, engineering and geosciences.
What hardware does M3 have?
M3 is made up of a large number of (mostly Intel) CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs connected by fast Mellanox (NVIDIA) RDMA over Converged Ethernet. The CPUs are quite powerful on their own, but M3's real benefit is that your workload can be split across many CPUs at once, allowing parallel workloads to be executed much more quickly.
Is M3 right for me?
If you are a Monash researcher who needs to process large amounts of data more quickly than is possible on your own computer, then M3 can speed up your work. If you only have a relatively light workload, particularly one that does not rely on GPUs, then Monash PhD students can apply for a PEACH project which gives you access a small partition of M3 that may be more suitable for you.
How can I use M3?
If you're interested in using M3, please see our Getting Started guide. Your usage of M3 is subject to the MASSIVE Terms of Use.