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New Zealand's fledgling "supercomputing" data processing industry could receive a boost through a research partnership between Sun Microsystems and Otago University.
Otago has been named as the first university outside of the US to join Sun's OpenSPARC (scalable processor architecture) network of research centres which includes Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities.
The network is an initiative aimed at encouraging researchers, programmers, engineers, technologists and Sun executives to collaborate on projects addressing the increasing demand for more powerful computers.
Sun says Otago's inclusion in the network recognises the university's expertise in computer architecture, networking and parallel computing.
Scott Houston, of the Wellington-based New Zealand Supercomputer Centre, which sells supercomputing processing capacity, said research being carried out at Otago was of interest to the centre because of the commercial opportunities it presented.
"We build on-demand engines, which involve taking large problems, breaking them into processes and solving these problems using large numbers of computers. But some computational problems cannot be 'broken down' or parallelised, such as climate modelling and human physiology."
"In those cases, we need to aggregate a large number of computers to address the problem as one system; the work the Otago team are doing addresses this."
