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HPC and Linux Developments
Apr. 3rd, 2019 11:29 pmLast night I gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on Easybuild: Building Software with Ease, which had a surprising number of people turn up (around 40) on what I thought was a relatively obscure and deep part of the IT world, relevant mainly to the people who are in the HPC space. As I was the only speaker for the night (normally there's two, which also make the attendance surprising), I gave a longer than usual presentation and was able to cover the basics of why compiled software is more efficient than packaged, basics and advanced aspects of easybuild configs, easyblocks, and various elaborations. Whilst not exclusive, Easybuild was built with HPC systems in mind and it is in that context that I use it pretty much several times a day at least.
On another HPC-related matter, there is movement going around on the International HPC Certification Forum. Myself and a representative at Pawsey are fishing around with the Australian Research Data Commons to see if there is some coin available to fund development of HPC training, including developing examination questions for the International HPC Certification. Further, I had my first formal meeting for my other Otago University paper, Learning Theory and Practice in Higher Education, which has a stronger autonomous and research orientation - my project is implementing the International HPC Certification Exam, and the provision of a well-developed PRINCE2-style project plan seemed to impress, with some interesting discussion on the collection of metrics from history files to survey development of learners. I may try that next week when I run two days of coursework.
One aspect that my supervisor did raise was about encouraging intrinsic motivation in this space. I have ranted and raved about many times, but I was astounding lucky to have my hands-on computing experience in 80s with the CLI. Since then we've had around 30 years of the GUI by default and whilst it has lowered the bar for doing simple things, it has removed people from understanding the environment, caused a loss of performance, and, of course, hides the incredible power that one has with the CLI. Part of this came to the fore on Monday night, when I took the opportunity to write up Praise-Singing Popper Utilities. These are a suite of commands which allows one to manipulate and extract information from PDFs from the command-line. I mentioned them in a talk I gave last year on Linux and PDFs and the opportunity arose to give a practical example after some people at RK College were having issues with assignment submission. The system is only able to accept one file per assignment and some students had a multi-part assignment; some apparently overwrote their submission instead of exporting to a common file format and concatenating.
On another HPC-related matter, there is movement going around on the International HPC Certification Forum. Myself and a representative at Pawsey are fishing around with the Australian Research Data Commons to see if there is some coin available to fund development of HPC training, including developing examination questions for the International HPC Certification. Further, I had my first formal meeting for my other Otago University paper, Learning Theory and Practice in Higher Education, which has a stronger autonomous and research orientation - my project is implementing the International HPC Certification Exam, and the provision of a well-developed PRINCE2-style project plan seemed to impress, with some interesting discussion on the collection of metrics from history files to survey development of learners. I may try that next week when I run two days of coursework.
One aspect that my supervisor did raise was about encouraging intrinsic motivation in this space. I have ranted and raved about many times, but I was astounding lucky to have my hands-on computing experience in 80s with the CLI. Since then we've had around 30 years of the GUI by default and whilst it has lowered the bar for doing simple things, it has removed people from understanding the environment, caused a loss of performance, and, of course, hides the incredible power that one has with the CLI. Part of this came to the fore on Monday night, when I took the opportunity to write up Praise-Singing Popper Utilities. These are a suite of commands which allows one to manipulate and extract information from PDFs from the command-line. I mentioned them in a talk I gave last year on Linux and PDFs and the opportunity arose to give a practical example after some people at RK College were having issues with assignment submission. The system is only able to accept one file per assignment and some students had a multi-part assignment; some apparently overwrote their submission instead of exporting to a common file format and concatenating.
