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Supercomputer Arrival

It was a nail-biting moment, with the crane stretched to the limit of its ability, as New Zealand's most powerful scientific computer was recently lifted over the roof and lowered into the University of Auckland's Engineering Building. The Silicon Graphics Power Challenge GR 10000 features 16 processors, 2GB of RAM and 60 GB of disk storage. It is said to be more powerful than many of the recent Cray supercomputers.

In the past, computationally intensive research had to be carried out in cooperation with overseas researchers in order to get access to supercomputers. Now, with the new high performance computer, this research can be done in New Zealand. Some of the research will be carried out in areas ranging from quantum chemistry to computational fluid dynamics, bioengineering, operations research, geophysics and computer science. In addition to university applications, interest in the supercomputer has already been expressed by outside organisations, for example for airline crew scheduling and in the field of computer animation for films. Although the supercomputer is not intended to be a commercial operation, commercial usage will help subsidise some of the running costs.