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, the Cube consists of 48 multi-touch screens that are 2 stories 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 installations to radically reduce costs and improve performance.

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.

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.

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 installation is one of the flagship installations in terms of resolution, interactivity and content. Using graphics virtualization under VMware ESXi, the client now has 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.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a major Australian university with a truly global outlook. Home to over 50,000 students, QUT is providing real-world infrastructure, learning and teaching, and graduate skills to the next generation of change-makers.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is an ambitious institution, with a growing research output focused on technology and innovation. QUT ranks in the world’s top 200 universities. QUT's strategic plan is to establish as 'the university for the real world' and charts our provision of transformative education and research that is relevant to our communities. With more than 50,000 students across two inner-city campuses in Brisbane, QUT offers academic programs in fields spanning business, creative industries, education, engineering, health, law, science, and social justice.