CQUniversity is part of a Queensland universities supercomputer consortium which will receive $8.5 million to boost the capacity for research projects requiring massive data-crunching.

Queensland Industry Minister Desley Boyle made the funding announcement this week and said the work of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) was vital and an example of collaboration at its best.

"The QCIF was set up in 2001 to increase Queensland's innovative capacity using supercomputers, high-capacity data archives, visualisation and networking," Ms Boyle said.

"Its members are JCU, CQUniversity, Griffith, QUT, UQ and USQ.

"The infrastructure and eResearch staff of the QCIF supports research and development being undertaken in those member universities. The Foundation also works to encourage the uptake of advanced ICT capabilities by industry."

Ms Boyle said that the new funding followed on from a previous State Government investment of $16 million in the QCIF from 2002-2007.

She added that the $8.5 million would leverage at least $5.1 million of funding under the Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and a further $16 million cash and in-kind support from the QCIF's member universities.

"It's money well spent. Since 2002, the QCIF has supported around 60 research projects involving 340 researchers across the 6 universities," Ms Boyle said.

"Those projects cut across areas like nanotechnology, drug design, security, biosecurity, mining and environmental engineering and medical imaging.

The new QCIF funding will go towards upgrading advanced computer infrastructure, expanding its Industry Outreach Program, creating a program to tackle infrastructure challenges like urban congestion and water management, and supporting NCRIS research.

CQUniversity's ITD section has welcomed the news with Director Peter Edwards and senior manager Merv Connell commenting:

"This kind of collaboration (virtualised computing across multiple organisations and considerable distances) is an excellent way to maximise value from the High Performance Computing spend.

"The partner Queensland universities have staff on every site that collaborate to configure, support and operate the HPC equipment. 

"Part of the collaboration is to move 'processing capacity' from project to project according to needs - for example, a very large genome dataset might require considerable computing power from a number of universities' HPC installations to complete the analysis in a timely manner, even though some of the universities may not be directly involved in the research project - we collaborate to share scarce computing resources.  This maximises the value and minimises the overall cost of the HPC investment."