Empowering the national research ecosystem
Each year NeSI publishes an Annual Review to celebrate the work we do,
the people we work with, and the groundwork we're laying for future directions.
Below is an excerpt from our 2023 Annual Review.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, we’ve been looking aspirationally at developing our national eResearch platform to further the performance and outcomes of Aotearoa’s digitally-dynamic research sector.
Empowering future generations
As part of a Mātai Medical Research Institute internship program, NeSI aided 24 summer research interns to conduct MRI data processing experiments on the NeSI platform. The collaborative endeavour involved pre-populating codes, establishing automated pipelines, and installing necessary software on NeSI. The collaborative endeavor proved successful, with Mātai researchers expressing interest in partnering with NeSI again in the future.
NeSI was also invited to partner with the Antarctic Science Platform on its annual Winter School on Numerical Climate Modelling & Data Analysis. Attendees were upskilled across core skills like command line tools, high-performance computing, satellite data, and climate physics. Ambitiously the partnership chose to teach WRF simulations using actual Cyclone Gabrielle data, drawing a clear link to their research and significant impacts on Aotearoa’s people.
We also connected with PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at the MacDiarmid Institute’s Emerging Scientists Association (MESA) 2023 Bootcamp. The theme was ‘Simulating Reality - computational techniques for your research and career’ and NeSI was invited to share an overview of our services and learn about students’ work. The Bootcamp hosted 40 attendees and eight speakers from the MacDiarmid Institute, NeSI, the University of Auckland, and industry.
Helping researchers scale up
In 2023, NeSI’s regional connections opened new doors of opportunity for early career researchers in New Zealand. NeSI partnered with NCI Australia to advertise its HPC-AI Talent Program, which saw Hannah Kessenich from the University of Otago among 10 PhD students selected from a pool of 96 trans-Tasman applicants to receive financial and computing resources from NCI in 2023.
The computing resources – approximately 50,000 hours on the Gadi supercomputer – were a significant scale up from her existing use of NeSI’s HPC platform.
Later that year, NeSI supported Hannah and two other researchers – Joseph Guhlin and Fei (Travis) Dai – to connect with and learn from communities at the forefront of HPC, AI and Data Science research at the 2023 Australasia Leadership Computing Symposium. They presented their work, representing Aotearoa research in areas of climate science, bioinformatics, and deep neural networks.
Collaborating on national capability-building efforts
NeSI hosted NZ Carpentry Connect virtually in February as a pre-conference event to eResearch NZ at the University of Waikato. The event hosted online speakers from NZ’s training community, guests from the ARDC, and members of The Carpentries’ core team in the United States. This forum also provided space for conversations around how organisations like The Carpentries and NeSI can support indigenous researchers from a skills development perspective. A panel discussion had researchers of indigenous descent guiding the audience and the community through measures we could take to support this effort.
Research Bazaar Aotearoa is an annual national event where researchers across the country can gain digital skills through free, online workshops. NeSI co-facilitated the 2023 event with NZ universities and other organisations. In addition to assisting with workshops on Julia language programming, NeSI’s training team hosted an intensive, hands-on Introduction to HPC workshop.
NeSI is leading a nationwide initiative in collaboration with the Universities of Otago, Canterbury, Victoria, and Auckland to improve Software Carpentry (SWC) skills among New Zealand based researchers. As part of this effort, NeSI hosted an Introduction to Command Line workshop in late 2023. The workshop attracted a substantial audience, with recently certified Carpentries instructor trainers co-instructing lessons as part of their initiation to the New Zealand training landscape. This collaboration will gain momentum in 2024, playing a pivotal role in supporting research and skills teaching methodologies nationwide.
Supporting a breadth of science
NeSI prides itself on being a domain agnostic platform and we continue to see projects using our compute across a swathe of research domains. The proportion of usage by domain is relatively consistent with a steady increase in biology projects driving the ongoing growth in the number of projects in 2023.
These are just some of the many partnerships and activities that kept us busy in 2023.
Click here to read more from our 2023 Annual Review.
If you'd like to receive a printed copy of our review, get in touch.
