Chair's report
NeSI is becoming a recognised leader in facilitation and capability sharing, and the team has the values and the heart to engender trust and collaboration sector-wide.
As 2018 closes, we have in place our first nationally co-designed and shared computational research infrastructure, hosted at NIWA’s purpose-built Greta Point HPC Facility with a replicated site at the University of Auckland’s Tamaki Data Centre. Researchers are now making great use of its new scale, performance, and advanced technologies, to power their research. Early feedback is of a step change in the capabilities on offer, and of the science we can now approach from within New Zealand.
Looking back over 2018, I’m reminded how far we’ve come over the last 9 years. We started as a network of supercomputers, operating severally, providing national access to separate and in some cases pre-existing assets. We established NeSI on the principle of collaboration, as an embedded team operating from within partner institutions. We built NeSI’s foundations from the capabilities of the partners, with investment into national leadership and outreach to broaden our impact.
I credit much of our success to our strong management in NeSI, who have put in place a truly collaborative culture within NeSI, and exhibit the best of these qualities out to the wider sector. As leaders in a space of ever-changing and bleeding edge technologies, NeSI’s team are dealing day to day with the most demanding of our science needs for computing, and doing so across institutional and community boundaries. Not to put too fine a point on it, NeSI is an asset to the New Zealand science system.
As we look to the next phase of NeSI there are many opportunities in front of us. We should look to further develop NeSI alongside the ongoing evolution of the science system as a whole. We can see from our international benchmarks that there are significant gaps in our science system which are constraining our ambitions. While our computational mindsets are first rate, we have much more limited skill sets in the advanced computational technologies essential to modern science. If we’re to achieve desired levels of productivity and impact in the science system, we should look to NeSI as part of our national investment supporting broader science system transformation.
Rick Christie
Chair, Board of Directors
“As we look to the next phase of NeSI there are many opportunities in front of us. We should look to further develop NeSI alongside the ongoing evolution of the science system as a whole.”
