Fact sheet for NIWA’s HPCF


  • NIWA’s p575 POWER6 supercomputer is one of the most powerful computers in the world for use in environmental forecasting and the most powerful of its kind in the southern hemisphere.
  • It will be used to solve problems with potentially broad social, political, economic, and scientific impact in the fields of energy, biophysical, weather, weather-related hazards, marine and climate modelling and forecasting.
  • It will improve NIWA’s ability to create forecast models that are more aware of New Zealand’s complex geography, use more data and deliver faster and more reliable forecasts of hazards - especially flooding and coastal inundation.
  • It will be capable of performing 34 trillion (34 million million) calculations per second – the equivalent of about 7000 laptops all working together simultaneously. This will increase to 65 trillion calculations per second after an upgrade in 2011.
  • The supercomputer is about one hundred times faster than the previous Cray system, which means models that used to take 80 minutes to complete on 40% of the previous system will now be possible in 8 minutes on about 4% of the new system. That capacity will double again in the second phase of the project in 2011.
  • The supercomputer has five hundred times the storage of the existing system. The new system will initially have 740 magnetic disks, providing 0.5 Petabytes (500,000 Gigabytes, or 500 million Megabytes) of useable data storage, to increase to 1200 disks and 2.0 Petabytes (2.0 million Gigabytes).
  • It also has two automatic tape libraries that hold 5 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) of data - the equivalent of more than one million DVDs or a 3000 year long MP3 file. This means that if a DVD were written to the tape libraries at the rate of one every minute, it would take more than 2 years before their capacity was exhausted.
  • The High Performance Computing Facility is made up of 14 racks, each around two metres tall and some of them weighing as much as a mid-sized car. Four more will be added in 2012. The floor where it will be kept at NIWA’s Greta Point facility has been specially strengthened to hold its 18-tonne weight.
  • The new computer room in which the High Performance Computing Facility is housed has been designed: to withstand severe earthquake shaking,  the effects of a tsunami of the size generated by the 1855 Wairarapa Earthquake (it has a 1.2 m deep sub floor), to survive the effects of fire within the Allen Store (it is a concrete reinforced structure), and to provide a clean-room environment for the IBM equipment;
  • The High Performance Computing Facility is powered and cooled by a new plant facility that incorporates a 1 MW transformer, two 370 kW air-cooled water chillers, redundant computer room air conditioners, a cooling circuit that holds 5500 litres of chilled water, redundant water pumps (and circuits) that can move chilled water at 45 litres/s, an adaptive voltage conditioner to manage power system spikes and sags, two uninterruptable power supplies to manage mechanical and computer sub-systems in the event of a power system failure, a VESDA smoke and fire detection system, an Inergen fire suppression system, more than 4 km of sensor cabling in the HPCF Automatic Control System (HACS) which monitors around 2000 sensor outputs to manage and maintain the environmental services needed by the supercomputer.
  • The supercomputer is exactly the same as those used at all major global environmental prediction centres such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, and the UK Met Office. UK research estimated the benefit-to-cost ratio to be nine times the cost of ownership based on its ability to improve flood forecast lead times.
  • It will be available to scientists across the country through the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN), a high-speed research network that links universities and research institutes. It also supports NIWA’s role in the Natural Hazards Research Platform, the $140million 10-year research project that aims to better understand natural hazards such as volcanoes, earthquakes and severe weather.