MB: I am a statistician by training but a lot of the work I do involves the analysis of genomic data, usually focused on human disease.  A major part of that is the use of existing data, usually in the public domain, so there’s a large computational aspect to that.  Some researchers do this in [...]

KG: I’m the GeoNet Project Director at GNS Science. GeoNet is funded by the EQC to collect and present data for geological hazards monitoring. We operate 600 sensor sites (seismographs, strong ground shaking, GPS) around the country in a distributed network and transfer this data to Wellington for analysis and presentation. There are two sides [...]

GL: I am a volcanologist and am particularly interested in volcanic and tsunami mapping.  In volcanology, we get big datasets (large or complex), usually consisting of multiple data types.  Images are a primary data type for volcanology.  We also have a lot of data stored in GeoNet databases, MS Excel tables, as files in folders, [...]

MG: I am the Director of the Centre for eResearch (CeR) at Auckland University (www.eresearch.auckland.ac.nz).  CeR was established 4 years ago, and since founding has grown from 3 initial staff to 25 people in 2013, some funded by NeSI and others supported by various deans and departments in the University.  We’ve also grown from 20 [...]

JS: Internationally, Digital Humanities has developed strongly in recent years but New Zealand hasn’t kept up, in part because of a lack of policy documents we can point to as demonstration of its importance.  International development is so strong, however, that NZ is now following along – activity is growing because we can no longer [...]

DE: The nature of shared infrastructure in NZ at the moment means you need multiple institutions to be able to diagnose faults.  In one instance that I’m aware of, this meant technicians from more than ten organisations collaborating to diagnose a fault presumed to be at the national infrastructure level, which eventually turned out to [...]

CP: My research field is large scale genomics analysis of human disease.  I work with HPC on a commodity basis, with very large datasets that are very well suited to parallelisation but require quite a long time to analyse.  I also Chair the Project Advisory Group for NZGL, so I have to understand the IT [...]

KG: As a researcher, my need is to perform quantum calculations that usually take many days or weeks to complete, and require memory capacity and consistent stability from HPC, rather than speed.  That said, I’m completely agnostic about the underlying system that meets these needs. Most HPC work is actually done by post-grads, however unlike [...]

BB: When it comes to eResearch infrastructure as a scientist what I really want is to be left alone in my office without any help, using a rock-solid HPC service, through a high performance network that offers peak performance to my desk, and that is reliable, always available, and cost effective.  As a shared infrastructure, [...]