NIWA launches new climate and weather modelling supercomputer

photo: Photo courtesy of James Bass

Science agency NIWA has unveiled a new supercomputer with three times the computing power of its three existing supercomputers combined.

The supercomputer, based in a secure data facility north of Auckland, is capable of running complex climate and weather models faster than any computer currently used by scientific researchers in New Zealand.

Science Minister Judith Collins cut a sleek white ribbon across rows of black cabinets similar to those that house the supercomputers at the CDC’s secure data centre in Silverdale, north of Auckland.

Although the supercomputer isn’t actually ready for use yet, yesterday’s event was a chance to show off its capabilities and the secure environment in which it’s housed.

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NIWA chief executive John Morgan said the system, once operational, would far exceed anything currently available to the agency’s weather forecasters, freshwater modellers and other scientists.

“It will have computing power three times more powerful than the current NIWA supercomputer, which can perform three quadrillion calculations per second,” he said.

“For example, we run weather and climate models for New Zealand every six hours with an accuracy of 1.5 kilometres.”

“It runs every six hours because it takes too long to run. The new supercomputer will do it in three hours.”

The computers installed in the CDC’s data centers are carefully designed to withstand earthquakes, power outages and even intruders trying to get into the buildings, said Andrew Kirker of the CDC. Some of the walls are as thick as 80 centimeters.

But while supercomputers may be safe, for some of the scientists most likely to use them, their work isn’t necessarily safe.

NIWA’s small but highly skilled team of global climate modellers was axed in a round of redundancies this year, with about 90 positions axed in total.

Across the country, between 350 and 360 professional science jobs have disappeared in recent months, both at Crown research agencies such as NIWA and more broadly.

Mr Morgan said NIWA still had a large number of people capable of running climate models on computers, which would also be used to simulate earthquake risk, freshwater and other things. He highlighted the agency’s investment in data experts in artificial intelligence.

Morgan said NIWA had restructured to cope with falling revenues, including from the end of the government-funded 10-year National Science Challenge.

“The reorganisation of Niwa has been done, it was to solve a specific problem, which we have solved. What’s really exciting is that the next phase is bigger and better, so there’s investment in supercomputers, and NIWA has also invested in a lot of AI data scientists,” Morgan said.

Asked if the pain in science was over, Judith Collins said the job cuts were an operational decision by national research corporations such as NIWA, known as CRI, and said the National Science Challenge was supposed to end after 10 years.

So far, there has been no announcement of what will replace them.

“It’s really important for every CRI to right size, be prepared for the future and understand that we need to be very efficient. We don’t have any money to spend on people’s individual projects unless it delivers results for the taxpayers,” Collins said.

Sir Peter Gluckman, the former chief scientific adviser, is preparing proposals for the government on the future structure of the science sector.