Skip navigation.
Home

About Lev Lafayette

Lev Lafayette is a doctoral candidate at the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory and a MBA (Technology Management) student at the Chifley Business School. He holds an honours degree from Murdoch University in Politics, Philosophy and Sociology which is commented upon by the Vice-Chancellor of the time. With a interdisciplinary approach, Lev's interests include the political implementation of universal pragmatics, the relationship between communications technology and society and comparative economic systems.

Professionally however, Lev is an experienced ICT generalist, specialising in the Linux operating system and networking technologies. Previous employment and clients include several years working as a computer systems trainer and database management for the Parliamentary Labor Party in Victoria. Following this he worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor Leste (East Timor) managing their computer network and providing training and technical expertise to that Ministry in their first year of self-governance. Dr. Ramos-Horta provided the following comments on his work.

Lev works for the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing as a systems administrator for Linux clusters. As per that organisation, this site is dedicated to issues concerning High Performance Computing, Scientific Computing and Supercomputing, along with advanced collaborative technologies such as the Access Grid through the Australian Research Collaboration Service.

The crocodile logo was designed by Victoria Jankowski. It was first used on the cover of Neon-komputadór, the first IT training manual for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in East Timor which was printed and translated by the United Nations Development Programme. The crocodile represents the Timorese people and is the emblem of their land. The integrated circuit represents their independent connectivity to the wider world.

That's enough of me talking about myself in the third person like Cerebus The Aardvark. For the rest of this site it will be in first person. After all, I wrote this content.

Installing Underworld on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

Underworld is a 3D-parallel geodynamic modelling framework capable of deriving viscous / viscoplastic thermal, chemical and thermochemical models consistent with tectonic processes, such as mantle convection and lithospheric deformation over long time scales.

Installing Demond on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

Desmond is a software package developed at D.E. Shaw Research to perform high-speed molecular dynamics simulations of biological systems on parallel systems. Desmond and its source code are available without cost for non-commercial use by universities and other not-for-profit research institutions.

Installing LAMMPS (and MEAM) on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) is used to model atoms or as a parallel particle simulator at the atomic, meso, or continuum scale. It has potentials for soft materials (biomolecules, polymers) and solid-state materials (metals, semiconductors) and coarse-grained or mesoscopic systems.

I'm surprised I haven't documented this in the past, because I've installed it plenty of times. Nevertheless here's how it goes.

Replicating Packages on a new Debian/Ubuntu install

For a variety of reasons, you may wish to upgrade your Debian/Ubuntu or similar system without going through the normal process of a distribution update. Perhaps you are, for example, moving to entirely new hardware. Obviously you want to keep the data in your home directory; but you may also wish to keep the various packages you have previously downloaded. The following is some simple steps to make your life easier.

Gambit and FlexLM Issues on Ubuntu 8.10

A user visited with what at first appeared to be a minor problem. Previously we had installed Fluent CFD on their Macintosh system running Ubuntu but they particularly wanted to run Gambit as well, which does primarily the design modelling and meshing transition. Licenses had been received and from this point on it would seem to be a fairly trivial task.

Dilbert's Salary Theorem and Engineering

Dilbert's "Salary Theorem" states that "Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives and sales people."

This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following two postulates:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is money.

As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time

Since Knowledge = Power and Time = Money, therefore Knowledge = Work / Money

Solving this equation for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge

Installating FFTW on 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster CentOS 5 Linux

"FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e. the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST).", so says the website. FFTW stands for "Fastest Fourier Transform in the West." *sigh*

Installing CPMD on a 64-bit AMD Opteron Cluster running CentOS 5 Linux

CPMD, Car-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics, is an ab initio Electronic Structure and Molecular Dynamics Program and is copyrighted jointly by IBM Corp and by Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart, but distributed free of charge (with source) to non-profit organizations.

Installing Dreamwidth on a Ubuntu Server

Dreamwidth is an alternative to Livejournal that uses much of the same code-base. However they is certain additional features that make this a more worthwhile product to develop even if it currently is in a beta-stage.

Syndicate content