Big science projects fuelling data boom

Catalyst's Porirua-based Catalyst Cloud carries the capacity of 100,000 virtual servers. Photo / Thinkstock

Huge data-hungry science projects are fuelling a boom in New Zealand's data industry, says the director of a company which has just launched the country's first fully-automated cloud service.

Catalyst's Porirua-based Catalyst Cloud, which carries the capacity of 100,000 virtual servers and the potential to keep more than $40 million each year in New Zealand, opened last week as global tech entrepreneurs and experts gathered in Wellington for the annual Multicore World conference organised by Otago-based company Open Parallel.

The Catalyst Cloud, which was built using commodity hardware and developed on an open source cloud platform originally written by NASA and Texas-based cloud computing company Rackspace, would drive innovation in Kiwi companies in need of greater data capacity, Catalyst director Don Christie said.

Much of the growth in his industry here and overseas could be credited to sprawling international projects like the development of the world's largest radio-telescope - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) - which would ultimately reveal new information about the origins and history of the universe.

Catalyst had been assisting Open Parallel in the design of a software stack that would assist the telescope's Central Signal Processor (CSP), acting as the "brain" that converted digitised astronomical signals detected by the telescope's receivers.

Kiwi scientists and engineers are strongly represented among the more than 350 scientists and engineers working on the telescope, which will be 100 times as sensitive as the biggest present-day telescopes.

Dr Andrew Ensor, of AUT University is leading the design of its survey correlator, combining the signals from all of its receivers, and Dr Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, of Victoria University, will lead a team of researchers working on data processing.
Open Parallel is leading the Software Development Environment work package in the SKA's CSP development.

The computing power required by the radio-telescope - a trillion times more than was needed to send a man to the moon - did not yet exist and the requirement was being met with help from Catalyst and Open Parallel.

"There's a direct application for the infrastructure work that these huge science projects have to address and solve," Mr Christie said.

"So we wouldn't have our new cloud facility were it not for the contribution of NASA and CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research]."

Dozens of start-up companies which were present at a recent conference in Paris Mr Christie attended had also had their birth in these science projects.

"From a pure science perspective the SKA is all about radioastronomy. But from the economic and knowledge economy side of things, it's about huge digital and infrastructure spin-offs and as such, it's a no-brainer to support it."

Open Parallel's Nicolas Erdody was even hopeful the the multi-billion dollar SKA project could pave the way for New Zealand to become a world leader in the burgeoning big data industry.

Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce said an area of the Government's Business Growth Agenda, which aimed to build a more productive and competitive economy, was innovation.

"This goal is important because innovation enables firms to produce higher-value products and services more efficiently," he said.

"If we are going to achieve that goal of increasing our exports, we need more companies like Catalyst that are offering internationally competitive products and services."