KEY POINTS:
"You don't buy these things, they get offered to a select few," says the University of Canterbury's Professor Tim David, who is in charge of New Zealand's most powerful computer.
It's hard to talk over the roar of cooling fans in the air-conditioned room that holds the "Blue Fern" supercomputer.
Hundreds of flashing green lights within indicate everything is as it should be. If anything does goes wrong, say a hard drive fails, an IBM engineer on the other side of the world is likely to know about it before Blue Fern's local masters. That's part of the service that comes with the $5 million lease deal the University of Canterbury struck with IBM for one of its Blue Gene/L supercomputers, which can process a staggering 11 trillion operations a second.
In obtaining the 4000-processor computer, the university joins a group of 25 academic institutions with that level of computing power, including Harvard and MIT. It might appear to be overkill then for a smaller institution like the University Canterbury to have the only one of its type in Australasia. But that underestimates the ambition of the institution, which is a hotspot for technology research and development.
"We want our staff and students to be able to grapple with big problems. Without a high-performance computer we simply wouldn't be able to do those things," said Professor David at the launch of Blue Fern last night.
Canterbury already has a P-series IBM supercomputer. Professor David's hope is that the two supercomputers will be able to be used to simultaneously work on the same research projects.
The types of tasks Blue Fern will tackle include one for Professor Andy Sturman of the Centre for Atmospheric Research. He has been measuring wind flows over the South Island to provide data to companies to build wind farms.
Steve George, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Canterbury, has been modelling weather patterns - essential to understanding climate change.
Blue Fern will also be used to conduct research into Alzheimer's disease and diabetes. Canterbury will participate in the Blue Brain project, an IBM-backed venture to build a computational model of a brain. They're working on a mouse's brain at present.
"They don't have the blood profusion model," said Professor David. "We do. We'll be linking grand challenge problems together."
The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Victoria University and AUT University are founding members of the Blue Fern project.
Those organisations and some others will be able to connect to Blue Fern over the KAREN network, and Canterbury with be able to link with other Blue Gene users to exchange processing power.
At Canterbury, work will start next month on a project to house an innovation facility - UCi3 - in which up to 80 students will be encouraged to start their own companies and commercialise their ideas in everything from wireless communications to bio-engineering. The centre received $10 million in Government funding which was matched by companies such as Tait Electronics, Jade Software, Humanware, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
