ENTERTAINMENT
Boost for supercomputing in New Zealand
Supercomputing at Massey University in New Zealand gets a very significant boost with the installation of Double Helix at Albany campus. This powerful new cluster was commissioned by the university to supersede the original Helix, which just two years ago was ranked the most powerful in the country and in the world top 500 supercomputers.
This move to greater power and capacity was prompted by the arrival at the campus of leading theoretical chemist Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger and the seven other scientists who came to join him in the university’s new group of theoretical and computational chemists. Although Double Helix is vital to progressing the research of this group, it is an important advance to the University’s entire science community. Double Helix uses the latest 64-bit technology and has about 160 times the capacity of a desktop computer. It was sourced from Christchurch based Insite technology. The cluster this company is providing is believed to be the first cluster of AMD Opteron 250 processors in New Zealand. There is a Master node with 16Gb RAM and 19 slave nodes each with 4Gb RAM. Each node has dual processors and two 120Gb hard drives.
