The Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) says trials of its Globe Claritas system have been encouraging.

“A computation that used to take four hours on a normal desktop is now computed in just 10 minutes on the supercomputer,” says GNS marketing manager for hydrocarbons, Chris McKeown.

“Running a CPU-intensive sequence on 20 processors was 17 times faster than running on a single processor. When you take into account the time required to distribute the executable and data across the cluster we were able to get a linear speed up, relative to the number of processors used.

“Adding another 500 processors only increases the benefits we can pass on to customers, or they can take advantage of them themselves through our seismic processing on demand business model.”

GNS will be exhibiting Globe Claritas next month at the annual meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) in Houston, Texas - the biggest event of its kind in the world.

The New Zealand Supercomputing Centre now houses an additional 500 IBM Xeon Blade Processors, each Blade consisting of two Intel Xeon 3.4GHz processors with 8GB of RAM.

This brings the total number of processors to 1,644, making it one the largest commercially available supercomputers outside the US and placing it in the top 100 supercomputer clusters in the world.

The new processors will be used by Weta Digital for rendering 'King Kong' and will be managed by ICT company Gen-i, an arm of New Zealand Telecom.

The giant number-crunching complex can be connected to customers in New Zealand and overseas using dedicated one gigabit per second data connections provided by Telecom.

The NZSC is available to universities, research and development organisations, or any institution across any sector that requires on-demand power and performance to analyse large amounts of data but lacks the computing infrastructure.

Other uses for the NZSC include computer-aided engineering, digital content and creation, economic and financial modelling, life science and geo-science research and development. For more information see www.nzsc.co.nz.

GNS is the Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences Limited, a New Zealand Crown Research Institute with more than 260 staff that offers independent scientific and technical advice. For more information see www.gns.cri.nz