Highlights
Garth Harmsworth and Chris McDowall using the Māori Land Visualisation Tool. Image H Betts
National e-Science Infrastructure
We are a partner in the $48m National e-Science Infrastructure (NeSI) investment by the Government, NIWA and the Universities of Auckland, Canterbury and Otago to build and operate three complementary high-performance computing facilities. The first stage of Landcare Research and University of Auckland’s joint facility went live in early February 2012.
The first Landcare Research project to take advantage of NeSI was one examining genomes of native stick insects. Genomic data are key to understanding the evolution of species and how closely related they are to other species, which in turn affects taxonomic and conservation strategies. Increasingly-sophisticated DNA sequencing technologies are generating vast amounts of data, which presents technical challenges for data management, processing and analysis.
Previously it took a whole week to process DNA sequence data from each individual stick insect, even when using a fast multi-core desktop Linux machine with plenty of RAM. However, using NeSI resources, processing time was reduced to a mere three hours; a somewhat dramatic and significant improvement! Further improvements are expected as we explore the options of processing multiple files simultaneously and by chaining multi-step sequence analyses together in an automated process.
NeSI is a Strategic Investment project.
Tuakiri - Access Federation
We worked with the Universities of Auckland and Canterbury to develop Tuakiri - New Zealand Access Federation, a new service for member universities and CRIs. Tuakiri (meaning ‘identity’ in Maori) provides a framework for simplifying controlled access to NeSI, research data and developmental workspaces, and resources located in other organisations. The key benefit is that users only need one login – the personal login for their own organisation – to reach multiple service providers. Tuakiri automatically checks with the ‘home’ organisation to verify that the user is legitimate and determine what level of access that person has. For example, university students would generally have access to limited information resources; whereas researchers collaborating on new commercially-sensitive technologies or requiring NeSI resources for computationally-intense investigations would have much deeper access to shared resources.
Tuakiri marks a very positive step towards supporting an increasingly collaborative approach to research and education in New Zealand. It brings New Zealand into line with other similar restricted-access federation services available for education and research institutions in Australia, the US, UK and Europe.
Development of Tuakiri was sponsored by MSI. It was launched in July 2012 and is now self-supporting with members paying an annual fee. One of our staff is Vice-President of the Tuakiri Executive.
Data management
Data management is a common challenge for scientific organisations the world over. Our effectiveness in delivering environmental solutions depends upon our ability to access, process and store data and make information available in user-friendly fit-for-purpose ways. Our Data Management and Warehousing project supports our contractual data obligations for our major databases as well as the myriad smaller everyday datasets that support our research. It also ensures our data management and data standards are consistent with evolving global standards (and hence that our datasets can be integrated with overseas datasets) and will enable many of Landcare Research’s environmental-modelling research efforts to move to the new NeSI highperformance-computing facilities.
This is a strategic investment project.