High Performance Computing Facility

The High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) is supercharging New Zealand science.

The High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) is supercharging New Zealand science—powering researchers working at the forefront of New Zealand’s greatest science challenges.

Two of the three supercomputers which make up the HPCF are housed in NIWA’s Greta Point campus in Wellington. Mahuika is on the left, a shared storage system is in the middle and Māui is on the right. [Photo: NIWA]  

The HPCF consists of three interconnected Cray supercomputers—together capable of processing more than two thousand trillion calculations per second.

Māui and Mahuika are housed at NIWA’s Wellington campus. Kupe is sited at the University of Auckland's Tamaki Data Centre.

These three powerful Cray supercomputers were commissioned in 2018 and lead investigations into fields such as:

  • Modelling the impact of climate change:
  • Forecasting weather related hazards
  • Analysing genetic information 
  • Understanding the systems driving our oceans 
  • Tracking New Zealand’s freshwater resources
  • Investigating New Zealand’s seismic risk 
  • Building science algorithms and artificial intelligence networks.

NIWA works with New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) to ensure researchers from universities and institutions across the country can harness this computing power for the benefit of all New Zealanders.

Information for those seeking access to the HPCF can be found at: https://support.NeSI.org.nz

Dave Allen, NIWA
Massive computing power allows NIWA scientists not only to analyse more data, faster, but to envisage completely new experiments.