M3
Monash University – together with NVIDIA and OpenACC organisation, the NCI Australia, Australian BioCommons, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre and SHARON.AI – will be hosting an in-person Open Hackathon. This hands-on, multi-day event is designed to help computational scientists and researchers accelerate and optimise their applications across a range of data centre architectures, including CPUs and GPUs.
This event is ideal for scientists, researchers and developers working in Australian research institutions, NCRIS facilities, national science agencies and research centres who can bring a team to work on their computational science challenge. Participants will leave with their scientific applications accelerated and/or optimised on high-performance computers, or with a clear roadmap of how to leverage these resources.
Please pass this on to colleagues or research groups who may be interested in joining.
| Event | Information |
|---|---|
| Application Deadline | January 6, 2026 |
| Day 0 (online) | February 13, 2026 |
| Days 1-4 (in person) | February 24–27, 2026 |
| Location | Monash University, Clayton Campus |
| To learn more and register | https://www.openhackathons.org/s/siteevent/a0CUP00001FSddg2AD/se000394 |
M3 will be offline for up to two days for system maintenance. During this outage, we have scheduled to conduct these activities:
- /home maintenance,
- host firmware updates,
- OS and security updates,
- LDAP maintenance, and
- Lustre file system update.
Scheduled Outage Inclusive Dates:
Wednesday, 26 November 2025 and Thursday, 27 November 2025. Up to two days starting at 8 AM AEDT on Wednesday the 26th of November 2025
How this affects you:
During the two-day maintenance period, M3 users will be unable to log into the cluster. Access to the cluster via Strudel Desktop, ssh, rsync, sftp, Globus will not be available. There will be no access to user $HOME and data on the Lustre file system /fs04 (which includes /projects and /scratch2). New user and new project provisioning will not take place during the maintenance period.
A reservation is now in place to ensure that running jobs complete before the start of the maintenance window. Pending jobs will remain in the queue and will only be scheduled to run after the service is restored.
If you have any concerns or questions, please email us help@massive.org.au.
We will be running the following courses soon:
- Introduction To Unix (Thu 27th, Fri 28th Nov 2025)
- Introduction to HPC (Fri 5th Dec 2025)
Please see here for more information.
2/Feb/2025 An update on the upcoming file system migration
As previously advised, /scratch will be decommissioned and we have
commenced work to migrate /scratch to /scratch2.
We have now updated the user_info command so that it now reports the
project usage and quotas for both scratch spaces.
There is no action needed at your end at this time.
18/Dec/2024: We are still in the process of porting our old M3 documentation from https://old-docs.massive.org.au/. As part of this process, we have aimed to improve our M3 docs by removing outdated content, restructuring, and rewriting some pages.
For a near-replica of the old docs, please see https://docs.erc.monash.edu/old-M3/.
If you identify any content that is missing from these new docs, or otherwise have any feedback about these docs, please let us know! In the meantime, you may still find what you're looking for in our old docs.
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, and is the third stage of 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) InfiniBand interconnects. 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 MonARCH is effectively a smaller version 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.