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.

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.

An visit to the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES) in Montpellier was taken on Friday 21st of October.

An visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva was taken on Thursday 20th of October, an event that was announced on CERN's website, with a programme of prsentations.

The 6th Multicore World will be held on Monday 20th to Wednesday 22nd of February 2017 at Shed 6 on the Wellington (NZ) waterfront. Nicolás Erdödy (Open Parallel) has once again done an amazing job at finding some the significant speakers in the world in parallel programming and multicore systems to attend. Although a short - and not an enormous conference - the technical quality is always extremely high, dealing with some of the most fundamental problems and recent experiences in these fields.

Presentation to Linux Users of Victoria, 7th February, 2017

An overview of cloud computing platforms in general, and OpenStack in particular, is provided introduces this presentation. Cloud computing is one of the most significant changes to IT infrastructure and employment in the past decade, with major corporate services (Amazon, Microsoft) gaining particular significance in the late 2000s. In mid-2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack, with initial code coming from NASA's Nebula project and Rackspace's Cloud Files project, and soon gained prominence as the largest open-source cloud platform. Although a cross-platform service, it was quickly available on various Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE (2011), and Red Hat (2012).

OpenStack is governed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012. Correlating with the release cycle of the product, OpenStack Summits are held every six months for developers, users and managers. The most recent Summit was held in Barcelona in late October 2016, with over 5000 attendees, almost 1000 organisations and companies, and 500 sessions, spread out over three days, plus one day of "Upstream University" prior to the main schedule, plus one day after the main schedule for contributor working parties. The presentation will cover the major announcements of the conference as well as a brief overview of the major streams, as well the direction of OpenStack as the November Sydney Summit approaches.

Had a friendly meeting a few days ago with a young person debating their future career path. They had a very good IT-orientated resume (give this person a job, seriously) but were debating whether they should go down the path of a Business Analyst. It was fairly clear that they lived and breathed IT, whereas the BA choice was one of some indifference. In reverse, there was a situation when VPAC had a year of summer school graduates where it became quickly obvious that none of them had any passion for IT.

An visit to the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg was taken on the 19th of October, which is is home for an HPC centre which specializes in Neuroscience, Elementary Particle Physics and Microsystems Engineering giving the name to the system: NEMO. NEMO is a CentOS 7 cluster with has 756 compute nodes (plus a few others) using Intel Broadwell for a total of 526 TFlops of performance and OmniPath interconnect, and is a Top500 system.

The visit to the University of Stuttgart was carried out on the 17th and 18th of October, 2016. The High Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart University (HLRS) is Germany's first national HPC centre, established in 1996.

When installing a new system (whether HPC, cloud, or just a bunch of servers, disks, etc), they must be housed. Certainly this can be without any specialist environment, especially if one is building a small test cluster; for example with half-a-dozen old but homogeneous systems, each connected with 100BASE-TX ethernet to a switch etc.