Lev Lafayette

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 an 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.

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.