Lev Lafayette

Gaussian is a well-known computational chemistry package, and sometimes subject to debate over its license (e.g., the terms state researchers who develop competing software packages are not permitted to use the software, compare performance etc). Whilst I have some strong opinions about such a license, this will be elaborated at another time. The purpose here is to illustrate the use of heredocs with Slurm.

High performance computing and cloud computing have traditionally been seen as separate solutions to separate problems, dealing with issues of performance and flexibility respectively. In a diverse research environment however, both sets of compute requirements can occur. In addition to the administrative benefits in combining both requirements into a single unified system, opportunities are provided for incremental expansion.

Advanced Computing : An International Journal was a publication that I considering writing for. However it is almost certainly a predatory open-access journal, that seeks a "publication charge", without even performing the minimal standards of editorial checking.

I can just tolerate the fact that the most recent issue has numerous spelling and grammatical errors as the I believe that English is not the first language of the authors. It should have been caught by the editors, but we'll let that slide for a far greater crime - that of widespread plagiarism.

The fact that the editors clearly didn't even check for this is in inexcusable oversight.

I opened this correspondence to the editors in the hope that others will find it prior to submitting or even considering submission to the journal in question. I also hope the editors take the opportunity to dramatically improve their editorial standards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.