Platforms

The Mahuika and Māui platforms provide the New Zealand research community with access to a national data-centric and data intensive research computing environment built on leading edge high performance computing (HPC) systems.

Attribution: 
Housed in a High Performance Computing Facility in Wellington, these platforms power research across the country. Mahuika is on the left, a shared storage system is in the middle, and Māui is on the right.

 

Mahuika

​Mahuika takes its name from the Māori goddess of fire, who was also the grandmother of Māui. In customary lore, Māui sourced fire for his people by convincing Mahuika to hand over flames burning from her fingers. 

As part of NeSI's national platform, Mahuika powers research across a range of fields, from ecosystem modelling, to engineering simulations, to language analysis, to human and taonga species genomics.

The cluster was expanded in late 2022 to allow a wider range of research communities to adopt HPC approaches and build digital skills within their research teams. Designed with a reduced carbon footprint in mind, Mahuika’s newest nodes are 2.5 times more power efficient than their predecessors. Other new components included:

  • Upgraded CPU nodes, based on AMD EPYC Milan architecture, to keep pace with ongoing growth in data, complexity of models, and a spread of computational maturity across research communities.

  • NVIDIA A100 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cards, paired with specialised software and tools for machine learning, to support more analysis at scale.

  • Specialised high-memory capabilities, to allow rapid simultaneous processing for faster results and insights.

As a Capacity HPC resource (i.e. a Cluster), Mahuika allows researchers to run many small compute jobs (e.g. from one core to a few hundred cores) simultaneously, also known as High Throughput Computing.

More information about the Mahuika system can be found in our Support pages, including:

 

Māui

​Māui takes its name from the powerful demi-god who, according to Māori tradition, used a magic hook to haul Te Ika a Māui – the North Island of New Zealand – from the depths of the southern oceans. 

As part of NeSI's national platform, Māui is designed to tackle complex simulations and support interactive data analysis. Researchers throughout Aotearoa New Zealand use Māui to lead investigations from the depths of the oceans to the atmosphere above. Projects range from tracking New Zealand’s freshwater resources, to understanding the systems driving our environment, to modelling the impacts of climate change.

Māui is a Capability HPC resource (i.e. a Supercomputer), allowing researchers to run calculations that require large numbers of processing cores (e.g. thousands) working in a tightly-coupled, parallel fashion.

More information about the Māui system can be found in our Support pages, including:

 

Getting started on the platforms

 

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