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RetortsHigh Performance Computing?? Us??I attended a meeting at the National Center for High Performance Computing in HsinChu Taiwan at the end of February, 1994. This meeting had as its primary goal to organise a series of conferences on High Performance Computing in Asia. The meeting was attended by representatives from Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Taiwan and India. As well as the business of the meeting each country made a report on their national High Performance Computing activities. It came as no surprise that the countries that have been making the greatest economic progress during the past decade were also the countries that were well ahead of New Zealand in research into and applications of modern high performance computing hardware and software. As part of my preparation for this meeting I requested information about institutional scientific computing activities from each of the Deans of Science and Engineering in New Zealand and each of the Chief Executives of the CRIs. The number of replies was just five and the scope of the research and applications these represented very slight indeed. My fellow NZ representative, Dr Peter Gill (Chemistry, Massey University), had put out a general enquiry on the electronic mail network before the meeting, seeking information on which to base a report. He obtained just one reply. Clearly this is a field in which New Zealand has slipped far behind middle and top ranking nations. The Asian meeting reinforced this, which first came home to me during a lecture tour of the UK in 1992. Almost every university I visited had a high performance machine on campus of one form or another. The problem with being so far behind is not only that our scientists have access to computer power which is of the order of 1,000 times less than their international peers, but also that our researchers and students are not able to participate in the the development of ideas, theories and applications which stem from and relate to the use of high performance devices. Increasingly we will be regarded as an academic back-water in a range of scientific scientific modelling areas from scheduling and weather forcasting through to computational medicine, parallel language development, visualization and speech analysis. A first step along the path towards international comparability in this area would be an increase in the funding allocated for HPC by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, while, at the same time, amalgamating the hardware and software oriented output classes and introducing a related infrastructural class for the mathematical sciences. The meeting agreed to start a series of annual meetings on HPC, starting in 1995 and rotating through the Asia-Pacific countries. Our aim should be to increase awareness and activity in this field to the point where not only can we report on our achievements with pride, but also confidently propose that one of the meetings be held in New Zealand. Dr Kevin Broughan, Associate Prof Maths, Waikato University |
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