INDUSTRY

The Helix supercomputer will soon be boosted with even more strength and speed. Just two years ago Helix was ranked the most powerful in New Zealand and one of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Now, an even more powerful cluster, Double Helix, has been commissioned by Massey University. The very powerful Double Helix uses the lastest 64-bit technology. The existing parallel computing system uses the older 32-bit technology and was quickly put to very high use by the science community. In the past eighteen months Helix has enabled the rapid progression of ground breaking research at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution. The need for greater power and capacity came when Massey boosted its strength in fundamental sciences with the appointment of theoretical chemist Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger at Albany campus earlier this year. Professor Schwerdtfeger is a shining star in his field and brings a world class reputation to Massey. He has come from the University of Auckland and has attracted seven other scientists who together make up an eight strong group of theoretical and computational chemists and physicists. The formation of this group prompted the University’s commitment to Double Helix, says Professor Mike Hendy who heads the committee formed to guide strategy on high performance parallel computing at Massey. “Access to a local high performance supercomputing facility is an essential component to the University’s development in bioinformatics and in computational chemistry/physics, says Professor Hendy. “It was clear that the current hardware was not sufficient for supporting some large scale research activities. Helix was not designed for such requirements. The additional 64-bit nodes we are purchasing, will be incorporated into Helix in a long term plan for meeting our future supercomputing requirements.” “Without a doubt Peter is one of Massey’s top scientists and he and his group are adding a new stream to sciences here. Because his team is based at Albany he also brings extra strength to that campus.” Professor Schwerdtfeger says the capacity of Double Helix gives an exciting opportunity to answering questions that have thus far beaten fundamental scientists. They are, for example investigating the left and right handed or ‘handedness’ that occurs within molecules. It has to do, he says,with the symmetry of nature. The Massey group is working in collaboration with a team of scientists in Paris who need the input of theoreticians. “They need our computational input, our ability to predict,” says Professor Schwerdtfeger. “Together we are learning more about fundamental issues and adding to the sum of knowledge about nature.” Massey is sourcing Double Helix from Christchurch based computer assembler, Insite Technology. The cluster this company is providing is believed to be the first cluster of AMD Opteron 250 processors in New Zealand. There will be a Master node with 16Gb RAM and 19 Slave nodes each with 4Mb RAM. Each node will have dual processors and two120Gb hard drives.