A visit to the University of Canterbury was conducted on Feburary 16, 2007. Like the University of Canterbury, Otago University now almost entirely has outsourced its HPC facilities to the NESI national facilities, although there is (small, aging) departmental clusters, an argument for local installations for real-time processing of streaming-data. As with the visit to the University of Canterbury, encouragement has been given for the institutions (or NESI) to take up the offer of shipping the recently decommissioned (but still Top 500 machine), Avoca, across The Ditch from The West Island.

Otaga University has made several impressive contributions to high performance computing in past years, most recently with the paper Efficient Selection Algorithm for Fast k-NN Search on GPUs presented to the 2015 IEEE 29th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. There are strong hopes (and plans afoot) for the University of Melbourne and the University of Otago to collaborate further on fundamental algorithms for GPU processing.

Special thanks are given to the members of the various New Zealand facilities who took their time to accommodate my visit and provide tours of their facilities. This includes Dave Eyers and Jim Cheetham at Otago University.

Originally posted at http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/researchplatforms/2017/02/20/otago-universit...