July 1, 2021 — A new $2.1 million investment announced by New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) will ensure the country’s national research computing platforms remain responsive and high-performing to power researchers’ data-centric and data-intensive research.

The investment, a collaboration by the University of Auckland, University of Otago, and Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, will double the performance and significantly extend the computational capabilities of the Mahuika High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. Since Mahuika came online in 2018 as part of New Zealand’s last major national infrastructure investment, the number of users and scale of research on the HPC platform has grown nearly 50% year upon year. In the last year, the Mahuika and Maui clusters have seen record-setting usage and sustained demand over time.

“What we’re seeing in the sector is a rapid uptake in software, tools, and technologies around computation — we’re lifting the scale and increasing the richness of the platform to keep pace with researchers exploring the frontiers of their science,” said Nick Jones, Director of NeSI. “No one party is capable of taking on that challenge alone, so this joint investment by NeSI Collaborators — the University of Auckland, the University of Otago and Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research — is the sector coming together to achieve scale and enable science.”

Whether it’s Covid-19 modelling, agritech, engineering, language analysis, environment and primary production genomics, or human and taonga species genomics, HPC and eScience are essential to the conduct of contemporary research.

“New Zealand researchers are using HPC and eScience to open doors for their contributions to leading edge research on the global stage,” said Jones. “HPC continues to be recognised as a strategic national capability, from the hardware innovations through to the societal and science challenges it enables.”

This upgrade and extension of Mahuika brings together new tools and technologies to keep pace with today’s increasing diversity of research drivers. These include growth in data, complexity of models, and a spread of maturity across research communities.

Mahuika’s additional capacity – based on the class-leading AMD Milan architecture – will allow a wider range of research communities to adopt HPC approaches and build digital skills within their research teams. New NVIDIA HGX 80GB A100 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cards – building on previous investments and paired with specialised software and tools for machine learning – will support more analysis at scale. Expanded high-memory capabilities will allow rapid simultaneous processing for faster results and insights. Also, all components are being designed with a reduced carbon footprint in mind. In addition to doubling Mahuika’s computing power, the new nodes are more than 2.5 times more power efficient. The new equipment will be hosted in Wellington, at the national purpose-designed and built HPC facility of NIWA, another NeSI Collaborator.

This investment also builds upon an ongoing partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), who will work with NeSI engineers to bring the Mahuika extension’s technology design and architecture to life.

“It is extremely positive to see a previous Cray systems customer see value in the broader portfolio that HPE can offer HPC clients by continuing the partnership a second time round,” said April Neoh, HPE Account Executive, HPC/AI & Big Data Storage. “With HPC and Enterprise Systems continuing to see convergence due to BigData and AI, the synergies of both our organisations will be key in leading New Zealand organizations of all sizes to be able to reap HPC’s benefits without the headaches traditionally associated with such a deployment.”

As demand from multiple science investments continues to drive contention, future investments will be required to sustain and advance New Zealand’s research sector.

“The richness and diversity of researcher needs are driving new and different expectations around how NeSI’s infrastructure and service models should evolve,” said Jones. “This extension of Mahuika is a first step in our journey towards delivering the sophisticated and complex services and tools NeSI Collaborators and stakeholders need to sustain a healthy research ecosystem.”

Comments from NZ research community: https://www.nesi.org.nz/news/2021/06/21-million-collaborative-investment-responds-growth-demand-and-scale-national-research#benefits

Technical components:

• • 64 dual socket Apollo 2000 XL225n nodes (AMD EPYC Milan 7713, 64 core / 128 threads, 2.0GHz base clock, 3.675GHz max boost clock, 256MB L3 cache, 225W TDP)
    • Of these, 56 have 512GB RAM and the remaining 8 have 1TB RAM
    • All have 1.92TB NVMe for swap and/or local scratch/temp, connected via HDR100 InfiniBand
  • Two new racks and new switching, including 2 Quantum 200Gb HDR InfiniBand managed switches
  • In total adds 8,448 new physical cores (double for logical cores), of which 7,168 are in identical specification nodes linked via a common top of rack leaf switch (providing both consistently low latency and high bandwidth)

As part of this investment, 4 new NVIDIA HGX 80GB A100 4-GPU systems based on NVIDIA’s HGX AI supercomputing platform — building on previous investments and paired with specialised software and tools for machine learning — will support more analysis at scale.

Also, Mahuika’s expanded high-memory capabilities will allow rapid simultaneous processing for faster results and insights.

Technical Specifications:

• 4 Apollo 6500 XL645d 4-way NVLink 80GB A100 HGX nodes with single socket AMD Milan 7713, 512GB RAM, 2 6.4TB NVMe drives, HDR200 InfiniBand
• In total adds 16 new 80GB NVIDIA A100 GPUs

About NeSI

New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) designs, builds, and operates a specialised national platform of shared High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and eResearch services. NeSI supports national capabilities across HPC infrastructure design and operations, research project support and enablement, researcher computational skills training, research software and data science engineering, and national-scale community facilitation and partnering. NeSI’s Collaborators – the University of Auckland, NIWA, the University of Otago, and Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research – play an essential role in the national platform by investing in the infrastructure, employing NeSI team members at their institutions, and enabling NeSI to connect with and respond to the evolving needs of research communities. Together with the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE), NeSI and its Collaborators ensure computational research projects in New Zealand are backed by the power and support necessary to make them a reality. For more information, visit https://www.nesi.org.nz/.

About HPE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise New Zealand is in the acceleration business. We help local customers use technology to slash the time it takes to turn ideas into value. In turn, they transform industries, markets and lives across the country. Some of our customers run traditional IT environments. Most are transitioning to a secure, cloud-enabled, mobile-friendly infrastructure. Many rely on a combination of both. Wherever they are in that journey, we provide the technology and solutions to help them succeed. We make IT environments more efficient, productive and secure, enabling fast, flexible responses to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. We enable some of New Zealand’s largest organisations to act quickly on ideas by delivering infrastructure that can be easily composed and recomposed to meet shifting demands, so they can lead in today’s marketplace of disruptive innovation. For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/nz/en/home.html.

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Source: NeSI; HPE