lev_lafayette's blog

Multicore World is a small conference held annually in New Zealand hosted by Open Parallel. What it lacks in numbers however it makes up in quality of the presenters. The 2017 conference included a typically impressive array of speakers dealing with some of the most difficult issues facing computational science, and included several important announcements in the fields of supercomputing, the Internet of Things, and manufacting issues.

A visit and presentation was conducted at Auckland University of Technology on February 27th, 2017. AUT has a small HPC research laboratory and like the rest of New Zealand makes us of the NESI national facilities, of which the "Pan" system hosted at the University of Auckland is local.

I have recently spent a few days in the company of Nyriad, a New Zealand IT company specialisng in GPU software. I wish to make a point of a few observations of the company because they are an example of both a startup company that uses agile project management, two terms much maligned and subject to justified cynicism, and does it right. Because I have seen so many colleagues burned by companies and organisations which profess such values and do not do it right, I hope the following observations will be useful for future organisations.

In recent weeks a project has been established by University of Melbourne marine research led by Dr. Eric Treml and Nyriad, an startup NZ company specialising in GPU software, in optimising code for marine population samples. Nyriad's main mission however is aimed to resolve one of the biggest and growing issues in computation, the growing gap between data computation and data i/o. The technical solution, led by Alex St.

It is difficult to describe the annual Multicore World conference with brevity. For the past six years it has operated out of New Zealand, the brain-child of Nicolas Erdody of Open Parallel, and for five of those six years your 'blogger has had the honour of MC for much of the proceedings. It is not a big conference by any stretch of the imagination, typically attracting around seventy participants.

HPC systems running massively parallel jobs need a fairly static software operating environment running on bare metal hardware, a high speed interconnect to reach their full potential, and offer linear performance scaling for cleverly designed applications. Cloud computing, on the other hand, offers flexible virtual environments and can be used for pleasingly parallel workloads.

A visit to the University of Canterbury was conducted on Feburary 16, 2007. Like the University of Canterbury, Otago University now almost entirely has outsourced its HPC facilities to the NESI national facilities, although there is (small, aging) departmental clusters, an argument for local installations for real-time processing of streaming-data.

A visit to the University of Canterbury was conducted on February 15, 2017. The University of Canterbury used to have its own impressive collection of HPC facilities. Alas, much of that has now been decommissioned (although Popper is still operational) with users largely moved to the national facilties, coordinated by NESI and hosted at NIWA and the University of Auckland respectively.

Several members of the Research Platforms team, as well as members of the NeCTAR Reseach Cloud, attended the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona from Sunday October 23 to Friday October 28th. OpenStack is big enough to have major conferences, "summits", twice year since 2010, correlating with an OpenStack software release.

The Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (BSC/CNS) is the peak national HPC facility in Spain and is home to MareNostrum (1.1 Pflops, 48,896 Intel Sandy Bridge processors in 3,056 nodes, including 84 Xeon Phi 5110P in 42 nodes, and 2 PB of storage; 29th system in the top500 in June 2013). They also have Mino Tauro, a heterogeneous GPGPU cluster. MareNostrum is not the most powerful system in the world, but it is the most beautiful. It is housed in the Chapel Torre Girona, a 19th century (deconsecrated) church.