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The NeSI High Performace Computers

The NeSI High Performance Computers Māui and Mahuika 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.

  • Māui, which in Maori mythology is credited with catching a giant fish using a fishhook taken from his grandmother's jaw-bone; the giant fish would become the North Island of New Zealand, provides a Capability (i.e. Supercomputer) HPC resource on which researchers can run simulations and calculations that require large numbers (e.g. thousands) of processing cores working in a tightly-coupled, parallel fashion.
  • Mahuika, which in Maori mythology, is a fire deity, from whom Māui obtained the secret of making fire, provides a Capacity (i.e. Cluster) HPC resource to allow researchers to run many small (e.g. from 1 core to a few hundred cores) compute jobs simultaneously (aka  High Throughput Computing).

Māui and Mahuika share the same high performance filesystems, accordingly, data created on either system are visible on the other (i.e. without the need to copy data between systems). However, they have different processors (Skylake on Māui, and Broadwell on Mahuika), and different flavours of Linux (SLES on Māui and CentOS on Mahuika), so shared applications should be explicitly compiled and linked for each architecture. These systems and Ancillary Nodes on Mahuika and on Māui  provide the research community with:

  • Leading edge HPCs (both Capacity and Capability) via a single point of access;
  • New user facing services that can act on the data held within the NeSI HPC infrastructure, including:
  • Pre- and post-processing systems to support workflows;
  • Virtual Laboratories that provide interactive access to science domain specific tools [Coming soon];
  • Remote visualisation services [Coming soon];
  • Advanced data analytics tools, and
  • The ability to seamlessly move data between high performance disk storage and offline tape.
  • Offsite replication of critical data (both online and offline).

These systems are accessed via a “lander” node using two-factor authentication.

NeSI researchers have access to all compute nodes on Mahuika, and 316 compute nodes on Māui.