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Yesterday I had the honour of chairing a work forum for one of our main users at Research Computing Services, one Bernie Pope. His work is mainly around human genomics and cancer and with the combination of high performance computing, storage services, and cloud applications, several papers have been published such as immune response in colorectal cancer, diagnostic tools for germline cancers, and so forth. It was a fascinating exploration of the complex workflow, the sequencing jigsaw puzzle, and the rather massive storage requirements (some 441,809 gigabytes in related projects). When one considers that close to fifty thousand people die each year in Australia due to cancers, this is all good solid research that suits my own disposition. Many years ago, when I was at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, my manager David Bannon summarised our work along the lines of: "We provide the computing infrastructure so that other scientists can make the discoveries and inventions that will make the world a better place".
It is that sort of approach that has also inspired two other projects that I've been working on in the past week. The first was elaborating my existing introduction to supercomputing teaching material to put on the university's Canvas LMS. Now, with some 15,000 words of content, I can hopefully gradually reduce the teaching load of this particular subject in favour of targetted and individual assistance for researchers. In other words, making one part of my workload increasingly redundant so I can increase my activities in another, a form of instructional scaffolding at scale. Perhaps even less exciting but no less onerous has been working on finishing a book chapter with the snappy title "Monitoring HPC Systems Against Compromised SSH" for the upcoming CRC Press publication "Cybersecurity & High-Performance Computing Environments". I really have been quite lax in getting this done, and am feeling quite poorly for it but as regular readers (and my editor) understand my health has had a few unexpected challenges this year.
Another related thought that has come to mind from the idea of "providing infrastructure" expands to social and personal relationships. It is common, but fallacious, for people to draw a dichotomy between being either dependent or independent. Such abstract concepts are divorced from the real continuum that is between codependence and interdependence. In the former the individual surrenders their own interests and desires to a controlling other out of fear, generating anxiety. In the latter the individual can grow because they have a sense of security that the other - motivated by love and concern alone - can and will provide support (e.g., emotional, financial) for them when they are vulnerable, thus reducing anxiety. I do not think that it is too far of a stretch to suggest that the different ways that social security and welfare are applied and administrated are analogous. Certainly, monstrosities like the Indue card create anxiety and shame rather than providing security. There has to be a better way.
It is that sort of approach that has also inspired two other projects that I've been working on in the past week. The first was elaborating my existing introduction to supercomputing teaching material to put on the university's Canvas LMS. Now, with some 15,000 words of content, I can hopefully gradually reduce the teaching load of this particular subject in favour of targetted and individual assistance for researchers. In other words, making one part of my workload increasingly redundant so I can increase my activities in another, a form of instructional scaffolding at scale. Perhaps even less exciting but no less onerous has been working on finishing a book chapter with the snappy title "Monitoring HPC Systems Against Compromised SSH" for the upcoming CRC Press publication "Cybersecurity & High-Performance Computing Environments". I really have been quite lax in getting this done, and am feeling quite poorly for it but as regular readers (and my editor) understand my health has had a few unexpected challenges this year.
Another related thought that has come to mind from the idea of "providing infrastructure" expands to social and personal relationships. It is common, but fallacious, for people to draw a dichotomy between being either dependent or independent. Such abstract concepts are divorced from the real continuum that is between codependence and interdependence. In the former the individual surrenders their own interests and desires to a controlling other out of fear, generating anxiety. In the latter the individual can grow because they have a sense of security that the other - motivated by love and concern alone - can and will provide support (e.g., emotional, financial) for them when they are vulnerable, thus reducing anxiety. I do not think that it is too far of a stretch to suggest that the different ways that social security and welfare are applied and administrated are analogous. Certainly, monstrosities like the Indue card create anxiety and shame rather than providing security. There has to be a better way.
