On 1 July 2025, NIWA merged with GNS Science to become Earth Sciences New Zealand.

Fact sheet for HPCF

Three Cray supercomputers—Māui, Mahuika and Kupe—make up the High Performance Computing Facility.

Three Cray supercomputers —Māui, Mahuika and Kupe—make up the High Performance Computing Facility.

  • Māui and Mahuika are housed at NIWA’s Wellington campus. Kupe is sited at the University of Auckland's Tamaki Data Centre.
  • Together the three computers are capable of processing more than two thousand trillion calculations per second.
  • The HPCF contains more than 14 petabytes of high performance storage along with 200 petabytes of archive storage and all scientific data is fully backed up.
  • The facility housing Māui and Mahuika features the latest heat transfer technology cutting cooling costs by half.
  • The facility has been specially constructed to withstand both seismic and tsunami threats.

Specifications

Māui

Cray XC50-LC Supercomputer

  • 18,650 × 2.4GHz Intel Skylake cores
  • 66.8 Terabytes of memory

Cray CS500 Virtual Labs Cluster

  • 1,120 × 2.4Ghz Intel Skylake cores
  • 21.5 Terabytes of memory

Mahuika

Cray CS400 Cluster High Performance Computer

  • 8,424 × 2.1GHz Intel Broadwell cores
  • 30.0 Terabytes of memory

Cray CS400 Virtual Labs Cluster

  • 640 × 2.1GHz Intel Broadwell Cores
  • 12.3 Terabytes of memory

Shared Storage – Māui and Mahuika

  • IBM ESS Disk and SSD Storage
  • 11 Petabytes of disk

Kupe 

Cray XC50-AC Supercomputer 

  • 4,160 × 2.4GHz Intel Skylake cores
  • 10 Terabytes of memory

Cray CS500 Virtual Labs Cluster

  • 440 × 2.4GHz Intel Skylake cores
  • 8.5 Terabytes of memory

Storage

  • IBM ESS Disk and SSD
  • 4 Petabytes

Holds a copy of all archived scientific data on Māui and Mahuika.