The Peter Jackson movies and some GNS seismic data have all been processed by the Wellington-based New Zealand Supercomputing Centre (NZSC), which is now hosting its first round of clients from New Zealand and around the world.

Jackson used Weta Digital for the special effects of Lord of the Rings and the soon-to-be-released remake of the King Kong classic. And in a tale that blurs the lines between Weta’s special effects and the GNS work of geophysics-geology, the southern hemisphere’s largest commercially available supercomputing LINUX cluster is now being offered to external clients.

NZSC, New Zealand Telecom and Gen-I want to commercialise the 1000 nodes of the LINUX cluster in innovative ways. GNS hydrocarbons group marketing manager Chris McKeown said that opened up some exciting possibilities for GNS.

The institure plans to optimise its GLOBE Claritas seismic data processing software to take full advantage of the NZSC's processing speed.

“Our seismic processing package, Globe Claritas, can run on a LINUX cluster and we are working with NZSC on testing the scalability of the software to pursue some exciting new business ideas," McKeown said.

“We want to take full advantage of the processing speed of the NZSC with its computing power roughly 9000 times more powerful than the average PC. The sheer power of the NZSC, combined with the ability to add user defined or third party modules into GLOBE Claritas, allows GNS to pursue a number of exciting new business models.”

A large US manufacturer is also using the NZSC cluster - which is made up of 1008 Intel 2.8 GHz Xeon processors on 504 IBM dual Blade servers - for advanced-generation computer chip product development and manufacturing. A Canadian biotech customer is using the facility for a variety of gene sequencing algorithms.