2015 Centre for eResearch Annual Report
Another year, another 25 million core hours. This year has seen some intense computational activity within the Centre for eResearch, with near 100 researchers now having passed the mark of consuming over 100,000 core hours each. Our High Performance Computing (HPC) service is provided via a partnership with the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI: https://www.nesi.org.nz), and we are grateful to their HPC and user-support teams which
have helped us achieve some great outcomes this year.
Our activities have broadened in 2015, we started new projects to offer university-wide services for research Virtual Machines, and the use of an advanced visualisation facility. We also launched a data publishing tool (figshare: https://auckland.figshare.com/) and began work a range of tools to support various research data needs. Within a modern university, such services are now an indispensible part of the research infrastructure. Finally, we started two important educational activities in 2015: (i) a regular slot in the PhD induction program to connect with our newest researchers, and a HackyHour weekly casual meet up to encourage shared approaches to problem-solving and support for researchers (https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/).
In this report, you will find details of our major outcomes and successes of 2015, details of our new activities and a brief overview of our plans for 2016. All of the showcased material, the feedback and the lists of research outcomes relies on responses from the University’s researchers to our requests for information. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those researchers who put their trust in us, and those who shared their outcomes and achievements back with us to help us create this report.
Professor Mark Gahegan
Director, Centre for eResearch