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Reseachers get NZ Super-computer Time for Free
Sunday, 31 October 2010
The University of Canterbury is helping New Zealand researchers take on the greatest challenges of their careers to date with a million free hours of use of its BlueFern supercomputer facility.
(via University of Canterbury) The BlueFern High Performance Computing (HPC) Grand Challenge was established to help researchers tackle some of the largest scientific problems.
BlueFern Director, Professor Tim David, says the BlueFern Grand Challenge aims to turbocharge New Zealand science.
The challenge's major award has gone to a project led by Nick Golledge from the Antarctic Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington. This project will utilise UC's supercomputer to run a 3D ice sheet model originally developed at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, to analyse changes in New Zealand glaciers. The simulations will use present day topography and climate as boundary conditions to analyse glacier growth and decay over the last 100,000 years.
Nick Golledge says: "Our project has reached a mature stage from which it could benefit greatly from higher-resolution simulations that will enable our research to produce higher-impact science."
Researchers from the University of Auckland's Computational Astronomy Group led by Philip Sharp, which has received a development award, will use simulations to study the evolution of the Solar System. It will use UC's supercomputer to model asteroid impacts on Earth.
Simon Greenhill from the Computational Evolution Group at the University of Auckland will use BlueFern to analyse a database that currently contains 680 languages to advance the group's study of linguistic and cultural change in the Pacific.
"We will use Bluefern to analyse data from the largest language family in the world using the most sophisticated models of lexical change and phylogenetic dating available. The results will generate new insights into the peopling of the Pacific and resolve longstanding debates about how and when humans entered Near Oceania and Micronesia, and help find the ultimate origins of the Austronesian peoples in South-East Asia."
A third development award has gone to Dr Mik Black and Dr Tony Merriman at the University of Otago who intend to use BlueFern to conduct an exhaustive search of 500,000 genetic variants to identify gene-gene interactions. This work will generate important biomedical insights into the pathways underlying human disease.
BlueFern was established in 2006 by the University of Canterbury in collaboration with IBM to make it easy and convenient for researchers to use world class supercomputers. BlueFern features the first IBM Blue Gene to be installed in the Southern Hemisphere and an IBM p575 super cluster.
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