GRAPHICS VIRTUALISATION ESX

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a major Australian university with a truly global outlook. Home to nearly 50,000 students, they are providing real-world infrastructure, learning and teaching, and graduate skills to the next generation of change-makers. QUT is an ambitious institution, with a growing research output focused on technology and innovation.

The university came to DiGiCOR with the project ‘The Cube’, which is one of the world’s largest digital interactive learning and display areas. Within QUT’s Science and Engineering Centre, he Cube consists of 48 multi-touch screens that are 2 storeys high. In addition to being a very unique digital experience, this assists the university in communicating research from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) concepts to the public.

QUT takes advantage of cutting-edge IT installation to radically reduce costs and improve performance.

Challenges

QUT had a current 12x 4RU SGI GPU with a single GTX Card fitted up for a refresh. Their growing 3D AV Platform with 48 touch screens and 5 projectors faced an increasing demand for more computing power to process graphics, images and moving objects. The university is also required to get more GPU Cards in a box to save on space and power usage. The new platform had to be suitable for VMware ESXi and also be able to house sound cards and local storage as well.

How We Helped

DiGiCOR was able to work closely with QUT to optimise their solution so that the organisation could fully integrate into their unique space-related onsite operations. Our solution was to install 10x 4RU Supermicro systems, each equipped with 4x GPU cards, dual 12 Core 3.2GHz processors, 256GB of RAM and SSDs local storage capability.

We collaboratively provided a better and more cost-performant solution that took care of their business objectives and budget without any sacrifice.

Results

This project for ‘The Cube’ installation at the university combined 40 ultra-thin bezels and MultiTaction touch displays with a passive projection surface. Taking advantage of accurate colour matching and advanced rendering tools, QUT has created an immersive corner with outstanding quality. This install is one of the flagship installations in terms of resolution, interactivity and content.

Using graphics virtualization under VMware ESXi, the client now has a much greater compute power with a much smaller footprint and scalability platform delivering data and applications on their 3D AV Project devices.

The solution has significantly reduced their footprint and rack space whilst reducing power bills by nearly half. With the extra GPU resources available today, QUT is now able to run more applications simultaneously and provide more responsive and interactive 3D objects/graphics.