Linux and HPC Training, LUV, Software Freedom Day, Writing...

Have spent a relatively gruelling past two days giving Linux and high-performance computing training to a small group of post-graduate and post-doctoral scientific researchers. It starts off pretty gently; some fairly simple Linux commands, and introduction to environment modules, and the Portable Batch System. The second day consists of of elaborations on the first; more complex commands, archiving and compression, file permissions, system and programming manipulation, sed and awk, bash scripting, combining scripting in PBS, job arrays and dependencies, and compiling MPI programs. At the end of it, I must confess I'm pretty exhausted (it's about 6 hours per day of lecturing). But the responses on feedback forms are invariably extremely positive, which makes it worthwhile.

On a related subject the Linux Users of Victoria annual general meeting is coming up soon (September 4). I'll be running again for a third term, but after that I hope that someone else will take up the torch. Shortly afterwards is Software Freedom Day (September 15), which I'm also taking the lead role in organising. We'll be hosting a conference, and have interesting plans for keynote speakers (e.g., HPC Manager David Bannon, Belgian social theorist Michel Bauwens, etc). Finally, I have been approached by an IT publishing company to write a book on an open source fluid dynamics application.