High Performance Computing
Use the country’s most powerful computers for your research
High performance computing (HPC), sometimes known as supercomputing, is available for New Zealand researchers. It has two roles. The first is is to greatly boost investigators’ ability to tackle large, difficult problems. The second is to enable current research to be carried out much faster.
NeSI's HPC facilities are the country's most powerful computers for scientific computing. NeSI enables New Zealand researchers to investigate scientific problems that were previously impossible. With access to both the country's most powerful computers for scientific computing and expertise of international calibre, researchers greatly increase the speed and size of processing their scientific workloads.
Gaining Access
Evaluate our systems
Fill in our Proposal Development allocation class form. Form submissions are reviewed weekly, require no funding and you can probably be up and running within 10 business days.
Conduct research
Fill in our Research allocation class form. Form submissions are reviewed every two months. Investigators are required to provide evidence of scientific merit via a peer-reviewed research grant, 20% funding and have experience operating an HPC facility. This can be demonstrated via reference to a previous Proposal Development allocation. Researchers are typically submitting their first jobs within 20 working days of the form submission being reviewed.
Postgraduate study
Fill in our Postgraduate allocation class form. Postgraduates have lowered entry requirements than career researchers. While they need to provide 20% funding, they do not have to demonstrate the project's scientific merit. Experience operating an HPC facility remains highly desireable. New researchers should first gain access via NeSI's Proposal Development allocation class
Teach parallel programming
NeSI is an excellent teaching platform for instructors of parallel computing. Contact the NeSI Director, Nick Jones nick.jones@nesi.org.nz to discuss.
Conduct commercial research & development
We welcome commercial research at NeSI. Businesses are required to provide 100% funding for their time and demonstrate experience using an HPC facility. For evaluation and testing, use the standard Proposal Development allocation class form. Proposal Development applications can be submitted outside of any formal arrangement at any time and provide zero cost access. Contact the NeSI Director, Nick Jones nick.jones@nesi.org.nz to discuss further.
Support
Every research project is assigned to a NeSI Advisor. The advisor's role is to work closely with you to make sure that your research is running smoothly. Read more about the Advisor role in our Access Policy.
If any problems arise, please email support@nesi.org.nz or visit NeSI Support.
Links to other NeSI Services
NeSI's Computational Science Collaboration service is accessible to research groups who have a current HPC project. We can assist to streamline workflows, optimise codes, enhance I/O performance and find other ways to enable you to get the most out of the NeSI HPC Service.
The NeSI Research Data service enables very easy data transfer between your local institution and NeSI facilities.
Technical Information
NeSI has several computing platforms across a number of CPU architectures, such as IBM POWER and Intel x86. Our systems are increasingly being supplemented with accelerators, such as NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The diversity of platforms enables research groups to perform sophisticated benchmarking and identify precisely where their workloads run best. Read more on NeSI's HPC platforms.