Mr Blair Bethwaite1
1New Zealand Escience Infrastructure, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Biography:
Blair Bethwaite is NeSI’s Solutions Manager. When not on a bike, squash court, or in the ocean, he specialises in innovation of the underlying systems and platforms to enable NeSI’s teams to deliver greater value to researchers. He has almost 20 years of experience in distributed computing; both in research and for research; for institutional and national projects; from science application collaborations, through grid & cloud middleware development, to full HPC & cloud system infrastructure design, implementation, and operations.
Abstract:
New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) is in the final stages of a major platform refresh, designed to better support the growing and changing needs of Aotearoa’s research community. This effort has involved not only upgrading hardware and infrastructure but also rethinking how researchers access and interact with high-performance computing (HPC) and data services.
We've evolved the way we work by embracing tools and approaches that are more flexible, scalable, and that can adapt to the changing shape of our sector. We want researchers across disciplines — from climate science to genomics, engineering to health sciences — to work more efficiently, collaborate more easily, and explore new approaches like machine learning and data-intensive analysis.
This talk will share insights from our platform refresh journey, lessons learned during the transition, and how we’ve kept the needs of researchers at the centre of our design and implementation process.
I'll also take you on a whirlwind tour of the technologies, and share some of the data centre jenga and pie-in-the-sky dreams we had for this refresh and migration of NeSI's platforms. Did we end up bringing HPC to the Cloud or turning HPC into Cloud? Maybe it was a bit of both – come along to find out.