M3
We are pleased to inform you that the M3 High-performance Computing (HPC) service has been fully restored and is now available for use.
Description of Issue:
It was necessary to lockdown M3 to apply an urgent security patch to address a serious vulnerability to the system. This vulnerability was published online earlier this morning and if exploited, it would have enabled any user to escalate their privileges on our system.
Our infrastructure and systems teams isolated the issue and applied the appropriate remediation to disable this exploit. This remediation, however, required all affected cluster hosts, including compute nodes, to be rebooted. We regret to advise that all running jobs have been cancelled.
Actions/Recommendations:
You can now return to using the service as usual. We have collected the list of all jobs (running and pending) and have provided them for your reference at /apps/slurm-25.05.5/missing.jobs.2026.04.30.txt. If you had any jobs submitted or running before the outage, we recommend checking their status and resubmitting if needed.
If you continue to experience any issues accessing or using M3, please contact us at help@massive.org.au.
M3 now supports jobstats, a free and open-source job monitoring platform designed for CPU and GPU clusters. You can use the command jobstats <jobid> to display a report of your CPU and GPU utilisation.
Note that this will only work for recent jobs as older jobs may not have a recorded metrics in the server. (We are working on improving this for 2026)
For example: jobstats 49272919
will show CPU and GPU usage on the job.
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.