Platforms

NeSI's platforms, Mahuika and Māui, provide the New Zealand research community with access to a national data-centric and data intensive research computing environment built on leading edge high performance computing (HPC) systems.

NeSI Maui Mahuika HPC facility
Attribution: 
Housed in a High Performance Computing Facility in Wellington, these platforms power research across the country. Mahuika is on the left, a shared storage system is in the middle, and Māui is on the right.

Mahuika

​Mahuika takes its name from the Māori goddess of fire, who was also the grandmother of Māui. In customary lore, Māui sourced fire for his people by convincing Mahuika to hand over flames burning from her fingers. 

As part of NeSI's national platform, Mahuika powers researchers throughout New Zealand in a range of fields, from genomics to the analysis of complex structures. As a Capacity HPC resource (i.e. a Cluster), it allows researchers to run many small compute jobs (e.g. from 1 core to a few hundred cores) simultaneously, also known as High Throughput Computing.

Mahuika incorporates:

  • Cray CS400 Cluster High Performance Computer
    • 8,424 x 2.1 GHz Intel Broadwell cores
    • 30 Terabytes of memory
  • Cray CS400 Virtual Labs Cluster
    • 640 x 2.1GHz Intel Broadwell Cores
    • 12.3 Terabytes of memory
    • 8 Nvidia Tesla P100 GPGPUs
  • IBM ESS Disk and SSD storage

Māui

​Māui takes its name from the powerful demi-god who, according to Māori tradition, used a magic hook to haul Te Ika a Māui -- the North Island of New Zealand -- from the depths of the southern oceans. 

As part of NeSI's national platform, Māui is giving researchers throughout New Zealand the power to reveal the secrets of science from the depths of the oceans to the atmosphere above. Māui provides a Capability HPC resource (i.e. a Supercomputer) on which researchers can run simulations and calculations that require large numbers of processing cores (e.g. thousands) working in a tightly-coupled, parallel fashion.

Māui incorporates:​

  • Cray XC50-LC Supercomputer
    • 18,650 x 2.4GHz Intel Skylake cores
    • 66.8 Terabytes of memory
  • Cray CS500 Virtual Labs Cluster
    • 1,120 x 2.4GHz Intel Skylake cores
    • 21.5 Terabytes of memory
    • 8 Nvidia Tesla P100 GPGPUs
  • IBM ESS Disk and SSD Storage

More Information

  • For additional technical details or instructional guides for getting started on these platforms, visit our NeSI User Support Centre. 
  • To begin using Mahuika or Māui, you must first apply for access.
  • If you have any questions or would like more information about how NeSI can support your computational research needs, contact support@nesi.org.nz.