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. As with other visits to New Zealand universities, there is a definite sense that whilst there is great virtue in having national facilities, there should also be local facilities for policy diversity, real-team processing, and especially storage and transfer matters. The AUT research centre has a particular interest in the Square Kilometre Array project with the director, Dr. Andrew Ensor, also holding the position of Director of the NZ SKA Alliance.

As with other institutional visits, a presentation on the history, architecture, development, and future of Spartan was provided to a group of members at the HPC Centre. Two aspects were of particular interest to those present: One being the optimisation of the system to account for large quantities of single core jobs or job arrays (especially through usage of MATLAB), and the second being the proposed development of abstracted job submissions for Virtual Laboratories. Continuing communication with the AUT team will inform them of further developments in that area.

Originally posted at: http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/researchplatforms/2017/03/02/auckland-univer...