2014 has been an extremely busy year for the Centre for eResearch. In partnership with NeSI, we have added some more hardware into our High Performance Computing facility (the Pan cluster), and a lot more researchers, projects and applications into our portfolio. We passed the landmark of 50 million CPU hours delivered and used by researchers since our record keeping began in January 2012.Over 50 scholars have now passed the mark of using over 500,000 CPU hours in support of their research. In many branches of research, access to massive amounts of computing power is now a prerequisite for those who aspire to publish in quality journals, and this trend is set to continue as more fields adapt to the opportunities afforded by large-scale analysis and simulation. These computing resources have been used to enable much diverse research, from archaeology to zoology; from cosmology to nano-materials. The Centre’s offerings have grown too. We now provide a Research Virtual Machine (RVM) service that supports interactive research applications, both on Linux and Windows, we also run a large-scale visualisation facility (using 20 displays working in synchrony) and we offer a variety of workshops to up-skill researchers in eResearch and high performance computing.

The report presented here details some of these achievements, showcasing a small cross-section of the projects we have worked on, providing metrics to show the extent that we have raised the computational capability of researchers across the University, and lists the research outcomes that have resulted from these efforts.

In 2015, we look forward to beginning new work to better support research data, to the expansion of our RVM and visualisation capabilities and to a continued partnership with the refunded NeSI. Get in touch with us if you face computational challenges with your research.

PROFESSOR MARK GAHEGAN

Director, Centre for eResearch, The University of Auckland