lev_lafayette's blog

Presentation to Software Freedom Day (Melbourne), September 2014

LUV annual general meetings are typically our smallest meetings of the year. It is a bold and few technically-inspired individuals who wish to sit through the necessary administrivia that keep the organisation alive in a formal sense, and the lack of an advertised speaker does suggest the possibility of ad-hoc pot-luck when it comes the short, technical lightning talks. However, I would like to make a special plea for LUV members to attend this agm. The reason being is that, after four years as president of LUV, I am going to step down from this position.

GNU zip is a compression utility free from patented algorithms. Software patents are stupid, and patented compression algorithms are especially stupid.

Presentation to the La Trobe Valley Linux Miniconference, Saturday July 19, 2014

Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, 1st July, 2014

1. About Patents

A definition from the World Intellectual Property Organisation "A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application." [1]

The final report of the ACIP (Australian government Advisory Panel on Intellectual Property) review of the Innovation Patent System came out today.

http://www.acip.gov.au/reviews/all-reviews/review-innovation-patent-system/

The good news is that ACIP have recommended that "no method, process or system shall be patentable".

THIS MEANS NO SOFTWARE PATENTS

Selections from the Report follow. I note that they referred to several of the examples were included in the LUV submission.

Presentation to ICCS 2014 International Conference on Computational Science, Cairns, June 10, 2014

Abstract

High performance computing is in increasing demand, especially with the need to conduct parallel processing on very large datasets, whether evaluated by volume, velocity and variety. Unfortunately the necessary skills - from familiarity with the command line interface, job submission, scripting, through to parallel programming - is not commonly taught at the level required for most researchers. As a result the uptake of HPC usage remains disproportionately low, with emphasis on system metrics taking priority, leading to a situation described as 'high performance computing considered harmful'. Changing this is not of a problem of computational science but rather a problem for computational science which can only be resolved from an multi-disciplinary approach. The following example addresses the main issues in such teaching and thus makes an appeal to some universality in application which may be useful for other institutions.

For the past several years the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) has conducted a range of training courses designed to bring the capabilities of postgraduate researchers to a level of competence useful for their research. These courses have developed in this time, in part through providing a significantly wider range of content for varying skillsets, but more importantly by introducing some of the key insights from the discipline of adult and tertiary education in the context of the increasing trend towards lifelong learning. This includes an andragagical orientation, providing integrated structural knowledge, encouraging learner autonomy, self-efficacy, and self-determination, utilising appropriate learning styles for the discipline, utilising modelling and scaffolding for example problems (as a contemporary version of proximal learning), and following up with a connectivist mentoring and outreach program in the context of a culturally diverse audience.

Keywords adult and tertiary education, high performance and scientific computing

Some MS-Windows Win-32 Intel Fortran code was produced with Visual Studio. The user, working on a 3D optimization of bone structure, wanted the code refactored to 64-bit Linux GNU Fortran 90 to be suitable for the Abaqus Finite Element Analysis software, and to be able to run on a cluster. This was in many ways a "first draft" modification of the code and further development is planned. It illustrates a basic introduction to some relatively interesting differences within Fortran and (yet another) practical use of job arrays.

In the organisation of one's life it's a good idea to make use of a scheduler - that is, a diary, a calender, etc - as distinct from a to-do list which will be visited at another time. This is the place for appointments etc that should not be changed; not tasks or projects. One particularly popular implementation, given that it can be accessed anywhere where one has Internet access, is Google Calendar.

Schrodinger is one of the more popular licensed computational chemistry suites, offering a range of associated products. Installation is relatively easy, but does require that the sysop pays some attention to the process and makes a handful of modifications as needed for their particular environment, in this case, MPI, PBS, and CentOS Linux.

Firstly, being licensed software, installation requires logon, which will provide access to a tarball of the suite of applications availabile.