Hardware

We maintain a clusters of five Sun Blade servers on which we run 20 virtual machines to support both parallel and independent serial computing needs. This is supported by a Hitachi SAN data storage unit.

We also have a small number of high-end multi-core workstations configured with 100 to 500 GB RAM for larger numerical problems.

Software

We use a range of software depending upon our needs ranging from commercial (e.g. ESRI, ENVI, IDRISI, Matlab, Statistica, etc.) to open source packages such as R, SAGA, MySQL, WEKA, CLUS, etc.

However, these resources alone are not adequate for us to work efficiently.  We rely substantially on custom software developed by Peter Griffioen to store, access, process  and synthesise large datasets.  This a major strength of the research group.

A considerable amount of our work revolves around finding the best of what habitat remains, given the available data.  Making sense of these complex problems is made easier through using Zonation software and the support from Atte Moilanen at the University of Helsinki.