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A Year in Supercomputing
Dec. 23rd, 2022 10:06 pmToday marks the EoY for work, another year in supercomputing. I can be pretty pleased with the final day's task; a researcher had 34 subjects with 100 optimisation runs across 40 variables. To run this in serial would have been somewhat time-consuming. With a combination of multiple job scrips, job arrays, and parallel loops with multiple cores, I think the computational task will have a c30000x speedup. I could possibly do more if the code refactored into a faster language and made use of GPUs. But that time isn't available, given the request came in yesterday! Still, it does serve as a valuable illustration of the sheer performance gains that can be achieved by decomposition, parallelisation, and job arrays in a high-performance computing environment. There's a reason our system has over 5000 users.
It's been an interesting year in my job; I achieved over and beyond stated expectations. I ran 26 workshops in high-performance computing, parallel programming, and the like, established a mentorship program for lead users in a dozen projects to further expand the training and education program, and gave guest lectures and tutorials for the course COMP90024 Cluster and Cloud Computing. I was the co-author of a chapter on secure shell in HPC environments. The HPC system was cited in at least 72 papers in the past year, mainly in genomics and related fields, and material engineering and fluid dynamics.
I attended three conferences and presented at eResearchNZ on the International HPC Certification Forum (which I remain on their Board), and wrote a background paper on Microprocesser Trends for HPC in 2022-23 (the work version had a lot more in-house information). I chaired work's Cultural Working Group which included organising a number of researcher presentations, and responses on mental health management (I also acquired a Mental Health First Aid certificate). All this on top of the usual tasks relating to HPC administration, job submission, software optimisation, and general advice to researchers on how to use the system. I'm rather looking forward to more of this next year, and I know I am fortunate to have a job that I enjoy, contributes something meaningful to the world, and provides good remuneration.
It's been an interesting year in my job; I achieved over and beyond stated expectations. I ran 26 workshops in high-performance computing, parallel programming, and the like, established a mentorship program for lead users in a dozen projects to further expand the training and education program, and gave guest lectures and tutorials for the course COMP90024 Cluster and Cloud Computing. I was the co-author of a chapter on secure shell in HPC environments. The HPC system was cited in at least 72 papers in the past year, mainly in genomics and related fields, and material engineering and fluid dynamics.
I attended three conferences and presented at eResearchNZ on the International HPC Certification Forum (which I remain on their Board), and wrote a background paper on Microprocesser Trends for HPC in 2022-23 (the work version had a lot more in-house information). I chaired work's Cultural Working Group which included organising a number of researcher presentations, and responses on mental health management (I also acquired a Mental Health First Aid certificate). All this on top of the usual tasks relating to HPC administration, job submission, software optimisation, and general advice to researchers on how to use the system. I'm rather looking forward to more of this next year, and I know I am fortunate to have a job that I enjoy, contributes something meaningful to the world, and provides good remuneration.
