eResearch NZ 2014 round up

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On 1 July 2025, the roles, services and technologies of New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) were integrated into the crown-owned company, Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand (REANNZ). Stay connected with us by visiting the REANNZ website.
 

Many thanks to the University of Waikato for hosting eResearch NZ 2014. The whole team really enjoyed their visit.

The conference was a great success, with representatives from universities, CRIs, public sector agencies and industry. It was particularly encouraging to see a number of our Australian colleagues at the event, discussing NeCTAR and other initiatives - particularly in the life sciences. The event has been featured in the web publication, the International Science Grid Weekly.

Research Impact

One of the most rewarding aspects of the conference was hearing about research that's being enabled through NeSI across many fields. Examples included evaluating a new approach to model the solar system, searching for new strategies to fight disease through modelling proteins, and understanding the sources of genomic variation in domestic applies.

NeSI's Presentations

NeSI staff provided a number of formal contributions to the conference:

  • NZ HPC Applications Workshop was chaired by John Rugis and Dan Sun. John is an expert in scientific programming, while Dan is the Service Delivery Manager at BlueFern and manages the national Computational Science Team.
     
  • NZ HPC Accelerators Workshop was hosted by John Rugis, Sina Masoud-Ansari and Jordi Blasco. The trio are based in Auckland, but provide support to researchers nationwide. They delivered an excellent afternoon covering the NVIDIA CUDA architecture and programming model, applications that benefit from GPU computation and an overview of the Intel Phi co-processor.
     
  • NeSI's Education & Training Coordinator, Jaison Mulerikkal, discussed eResearch and HPC training opportunities in New Zealand. His talk covered a included an international comparison and provided a vision for how this training may look in the future.
     
  • Sung Bae, a member of NeSI's computational science team, presented the results of research into speeding up matrix multiplication. Despite decades of research, very limited algorithmic progress has been made on this computationally demanding problem. Sung and collaborators made significant progress with by increasing the parallelism of the classic algorithm.
     

  • François Bissey, one of our Christchurch-based member of the computational science team, discussed the improvements that NeSI has made to facilitate high throughput workloads at NeSI. As François discusses, the right workflow can improve productivity tremendously.

  • Gene Soudlenkov, also a member of the computational science team, but based at Auckland, delivered a very interesting presentation demonstrating the diversity of scientific domains that are supported by NeSI's HPC platform in Auckland, known as Pan.
     

  • Jordi Blasco,  also a member of the computational science team, discussed about the importance of keep optimising and tuning the scientific codes. Jordi  used some real examples to illustrate how critical could be the impact in the performance, scalability and efficiency on shared HPC facilities.

  • NeSI Director, Nick Jones, presented an overview of NeSI's impact in the first two years of its existence and some of the plans for the future.
     
  • Glen Slater facilitated a thought-provoking panel relating the future of research practice in New Zealand. Glen has been working hard on the eResearch 2020 project over the last 18 months. You can read interviews with members of the research sector at the project website.

Getting to know everyone

NeSI were able to have about two dozen staff on hand to answer questions and catch up with researchers. It was a real privilege to be able hear about up and coming projects. For anyone interested in submitting a NeSI project proposal, the web address is nesi.org.nz/apply.

We hope that the community appreciated being able to interact with all of New Zealand's e-infrastructure research players, such as REANNZ and NZGL, as well as MBIE.

From Here

The strong sense from the crowd that once a year is not enough. We are investigating the possibility of facilitating regular, informal video conferences.

Keep in touch

To keep updated, please sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter. NeSI holds regular events and the newsletter is the best way to hear about them. If you would like to be updated as research outputs are produced, you are also welcome to follow our Mendeley group.

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