SNAP promotes the importance of the HPC support team

SNAP Champions Working Group defend HPC support team

As part of the financial sustainability process the HPC team was proposed to be disestablished. The SNAP Champions Working Group defended the HPC team, and made a submission as part of the consulting process. Part of the letter included some statistics on the use of Raapoi.

The high performance computing platform (Raapoi and support staff) are a critical component to research across the university. Future students are looking to courses that integrate and use high performance computing and computational tools.

Raapoi currently as of 2023 has 120 users, of which ECS are 29(24%), SBS are 24 (20%) and SCPS are 32 (27%). The remainder (35 or 29%) come from ARC, Ferrier, PSYC, Robinson, SEF, SGEES, SHPPI, SMS and Admin. HPC use is distributed over the whole university, with Chemistry&Physics, Engineering and Biology major users. Extracted from Raapoi use data 2023. Ferrier, ARC, SBS and SCPS, all currently hold multiple multi-million (M) dollars in grants that use the HPC, as well as smaller <1M grants, we estimate grants totalling more than 25M.

To be productive high performance computing requires active specialist care and attention.