New Zealand science to benefit from $50 million investment in eResearch

4 February 2011

Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon says that The University of Auckland is delighted to host the National e-Science Infrastructure (NeSI), to be built over the next 4 years with nearly $50 million co-invested by the Government and partner research organisations.

“The University has an excellent track-record in e-Research leadership and is committed to investing in this important new infrastructure,” says Professor McCutcheon.

“The University has been involved in e-Research since 2006, starting with leadership of the national distributed computing service BeSTGRID and culminating last year in the establishment of the Centre for e-Research, which successfully led the NeSI bid. Our researchers across a wide range of disciplines have benefitted significantly from this work. We look forward to contributing our expertise and sharing in the advantages offered by the expanded NeSI infrastructure.”

The establishment of the NeSI was announced today by Minister of Science and Innovation the Hon Wayne Mapp. The programme will provide high-performance computing capability and data storage as well as the expert personnel required to help New Zealand researchers to make use of the infrastructure.

The resources and personnel will be distributed around the country at six partner research organisations: the Universities of Auckland, Canterbury and Otago, and NIWA, AgResearch and Landcare Research.

“The NeSI project represents the most significant infrastructure investment for New Zealand’s science system in the last twenty years,” says Professor Mark Gahegan, Director of the Centre for e-Research at The University of Auckland. “New Zealand relies on research into some of science’s most complex problems to support its fundamental industries, and research institutions around the country require a step-change in our computational ability to address these problems well.”

“High-performance computing and its related e-science infrastructure have become indispensable components of modern science. Researchers regularly face complex computational challenges in their work and e-science involves working closely with them to tackle these challenges. It requires deep engagement between computer scientists and the research community, not just the provision of hardware.”

The Government has announced that it will invest $27.4 million in the NeSI over the next four years, and the partner research organisations will invest almost $21 million over the same period.

NeSI will be built collaboratively by the partner research organisations. It will include both new and existing high-performance computing hardware and services, and will use the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) to connect researchers to data and computing infrastructure.

Professor Gahegan says that the plans for NeSI took shape over the last two years, through careful coordination across the research sector, consultation with the wider community, and support from the then Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

The NeSI proposal built on experience gained with BeSTGRID (Broadband Enabled Science and Technology GRID), a smaller national distributed computing service led from The University of Auckland that has grown to include all of the Universities and some Crown Research Institutes in the country.

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