In 2021, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) procured and integrated Flexible HPC (Flexi HPC), a new high-performance private cloud platform. It is envisaged that NeSI’s FlexiHPC will provide the sector with a programmable platform for collaboration around science data and support a scalable approach to mid-tier HPC with national expertise complementing localised integration. This talk will cover some of the motivations and use-cases for the new infrastructure by reflecting back on the tenants through the first 3 years, highlighting key partnerships and integrations.

There is an ongoing discovery that feeds back into product development, learning across the strong partnership with AgResearch, repositories, sensitive data solutions, training environment, as well as NeSI's own emerging roadmap for migrating its traditional HPC capabilities. All of these examples make flexible use of the different layers of capability; from the underlying data center, network/REANNZ, security, Research Developer Cloud, colocation, and managed services that have been built collaboratively.

NeSI is finding the growing needs to learn and build capabilities around many areas both technical and non-technical; including cybersecurity, cloud native engineering, service design with defining value propositions for customers, building a mature service management approach, and indigenous data sovereignty. Flexi HPC aspires to play a core role in enabling collaboration with partnering organisations to embrace the shift in the mode of eResearch, in order to address dynamic needs of the researchers, building and supporting growing services and capabilities together with the community, and sharing the knowledge along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Blair Bethwaite has worked in distributed computing for over a decade that includes full HPC & cloud systems design, implementation, and operations. Previously at Monash University, Blair most recently led Monash’s use of OpenStack to underpin research computing. Originally from Christchurch, in mid2018 Blair returned to take up the opportunity of becoming NeSI’s Solutions Manager, focusing back up the technology stack closer to the user. Blair is leading the work in bringing FlexiHPC, a new highperformance private cloud platform, to NeSI.

Thomas Berger is Product Manager at NeSI. Thomas has been focused on improving the user experience of NeSI services by continuously improving MyNeSI, a researcher-facing portal, and also its equivalent internal service AdminNeSI. Thomas brings to NeSI over a decade of experience in product management skills with strong user focus and value driven approach.

Jun Huh is a Product Manager at NeSI. Jun brings his experience from start-up industries into the field of eResearch. He has been involved in genomic data management, and data sovereignty related projects in the recent past years, including Aotearoa Genomic Data Repository and Rakeiora Pathfinder project. Recently he has been focused on service design facilitation to help launching of NeSI's new Flexible HPC.

Dr Claire Rye is a Product Manager at NeSI based out of the University of Auckland. She is responsible for the National Data Transfer Service and works across the Aotearoa Genomics Data Repository and Rakeiora Pathfinder projects and looking at research data management and data lifecycle more generally across NeSI. Claire holds a PhD in organic chemistry and has spent the last 11 years working in the UK in a variety of research settings. Most recently, she was a Product Owner for the Ingestion service of the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform, overseeing the development of the software infrastructure and metadata standards that supports data sharing across HCA globally, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).

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